By Natasha Kacoroski

At the risk of jinxing it for all future events, I’m going to talk about the weather. You know the phrase “April showers bring May flowers?” Well, that held true because for the first time this year it rained at an event. The April habitat restoration started off with a storm. It was so wet that “under the table” shifted meanings in my vocabulary from sneaky to an “attempt to keep dry” because the sign-in sheets rapidly became Rorschach inkblot tests. I needed a rainy day plan for volunteer events, literally.

Despite the wet, 31 volunteers turned out for a total of 95 hours. We continued to mulch the living fence along the dog park, but focused most of our attention in the area between Lot G and the playfields, commonly called Snag Row. In total we moved about 12 cubic yards of mulch to surround 800 or so native plants, which means that our volunteer power was equal to that of a commercial dump truck. And since our volunteers are even skilled at detailed work, we placed the mulch in nice little inner tubes around each plant.

Part of what I love about volunteering at Marymoor Park every month is getting to see the changes through the seasons. It’s beautiful right now because some of those plants like the Indian plum (or osoberry), Oregon grape, and flowering currant, are blooming. And many birds have also started to nest. I think my favorite are the tree swallows. They are the small blue-green birds swooping around the meadow that nest in the boxes seen along the trail. When the light hits their feathers just right, they seem iridescent, and it’s fun to watch how they move. And to top it off for beautiful sights, around 11 a.m. the sun peeked through the clouds and we saw - you guessed it - a rainbow. All in all, our April habitat restoration event ended up being a lovely day to get outside and work, in part, because of the rain.