Rock Creek Songbirds is a habitat restoration & outreach initiative partner of the DC Bird Alliance. The project focuses on the Piney Branch section of Rock Creek National Park bordering the city’s Latino neighborhoods.
Since its inception in 2013 with funding from Audubon’s Together Green program, the Songbirds project has organized the planting of more than 600 trees and hundreds of wildflowers, shrubs and grasses. The project expanded the wetland behind the Piney Branch Parkway picnic pavilion by removing an asphalt slab that served as a basketball court before the area flooded. The 2,400-square-foot space was planted with both aquatic and upland species by students of the Sacred Heart School in nearby Mount Pleasant. Here are some comments from those students:
“Our local birds sing beautifully, and they like to live where we hike after school!”
“For DC to be their habitat is really interesting because we’re a city.”
Volunteers plant trees in Rock Creek Park as part of the Rock Creek Songbirds initiative
The “Songbird Journeys” exhibit, completed in 2016, features displays on migrating species, and video interviews with Latino residents that you can watch below. Funded by the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs and the DC Humanities Council, the one-room exhibit has migrated to schools, churches, and community venues around the city since its debut.
Among the beneficiaries of the Songbirds project is the wood thrush — the District of Columbia’s official bird. Though the park contains large tracts of wooded areas, the amount of suitable habitat has been shrinking in recent years due to development, deer browse, competition from non-native plants, extreme weather, and overuse. Loss of habitat has been linked to the dramatic decline in wood thrush populations throughout its range.
The Songbirds initiative fits into national initiatives aimed at protecting and enhancing habitat for birds through the four flyways that cross America. The migrants from Central America and Mexico that reach Rock Creek Park travel along the Atlantic Flyway, which encompasses some of the hemisphere’s most productive ecosystems.
Tree species planted in Piney Branch include oaks, tulip poplars, serviceberries, redbuds, dogwoods, viburnums, eastern red cedars, and American hollies. Besides Sacred Heart, the Songbirds project partnered with the Mundo Verde bilingual charter school, and Bancroft Elementary. Students planted small nurseries to care for saplings that were planted in a plot bordering the park.
In the classroom, a large, interactive floor map was used to explain the geography of North and Central America, while the importance of habitat was emphasized as students made scale models of a stream valley. As all the schools have substantial populations of students with Central American heritage, the migratory story is a particularly meaningful way to create a feeling of inclusion for young people of many backgrounds.
In 2024, Songbirds published a 100-page book celebrating the tenth anniversary of the project. The book includes chapters on the unique appeal of the wood thrush, the destruction of the Piney Branch stream valley to make way for development, the importance of oaks in the remaining parkland -- and an inventory of native plants still found there.
For copies of the book, or to volunteer, please contact:
Steve Dryden, Project Director
jsdryden@comcast.net