Cheasty: Stop the giveaway to exclusive-use-athletics

05 Mar Cheasty: Stop the giveaway to exclusive-use-athletics

posted from Seattle March 16, 2014

Cheasty has been a greenspace for approximately a century, and is now Seattle’s last interior forest.  The Parks Department wants to convert it to Mountain-Bike Central and has been attempting to keep the whole thing quiet so that neighbors and people who care about nature don’t find out about it.

Here is a link to a web page by Mark Ahlness, a retired school teacher who has been following this issue closely:

http://ahlness.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/a-tale-of-two-cheasties/

And here is a link to a petition on Change.org:

https://www.change.org/petitions/david-graves-maintain-foot-traffic-only-policy-within-cheasty-greenspace

And here is the photo of a Wilson’s Warbler that appears with that petition. (The shot is by Gerrit Vynn and appears on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website).  Wilson’s Warbler is a declining neotropical-migrant-insectivore bird (a high-risk group) that nests in Cheasty.  Wilson’s are mid-canopy nesters and are just the type of bird that would be made more vulnerable or dissuaded from even attempting nesting by all the activity and the footprint that would come with making this a Mountain-Bike center.

Here is a copy of the ad I ran in the Seattle Times on Tuesday March 4 which appeared on page A-4.