Western Wildlife Corridor comes into its own

Looking around a small, one-story building in Addyston, Tim Sisson doesn't see a dated house.

He sees a bustling nature center.

Sisson envisions children at interactive displays, learning about the plants and animals of Hamilton County's hills and river valley. Environmentalists holding a discussion about global warming. A group of hikers stopping in to pick up trail maps.

Out the window, the retired mechanical engineer imagines a family gobbling down lunch at a picnic area or heading up a hillside trail behind the center, where they'll be rewarded with a scenic view of the Ohio River.

If all goes as planned, this vision – the Kirby Nature Center and Preserve – will become a reality by summer 2016, said Sisson, president of the Western Wildlife Corridor, a nonprofit formed more than 20 years ago, which in the last several years has come into its own.

Today, the organization owns nearly 300 acres of land, roughly 227 football fields in size. The properties stretch west from Cincinnati toward the Indiana border and include three hikeable nature preserves open and free to all.

What sets the corridor apart from other natural areas in the region is a near absence of invasive alien plants.

Every week volunteers with the organization spray, hack and yank out foreign invaders like honeysuckle, garlic mustard and winter creeper that have infiltrated the region's forests.

The result: Natural spaces as they once were, aired out but not empty.

Room for paw paws, buckeyes, wildflowers and other species, choked out elsewhere, to stand in the sun.

"It’s just amazing how the native plants have come back," said Denis Conover, a botanist and professor of biology at the University of Cincinnati. "I wish I lived closer, I’d be spending a lot of time out there."

Like before

The wooded hillsides along the Ohio River in western Hamilton County were heavily logged in the early 1800s. Old growth oaks and maples were hauled down to riverside landings where steamboat crews brought them aboard to continue on their river journey.

"Pretty amazing to think that those big beautiful trees were just burned," Sisson said. "But that’s what they did."

Still, many of the trees that grew in their place are mature today, some more than 100 years old. As long as the Western Wildlife Corridor is around, Sisson said, they'll be protected.

Back in 1988, a natural corridor preserved along the West Side was a gleam in the eye of Imago , a grassroots environmental education organization based in East Price Hill.

Imago, which operates a 16-acre Earth Center at the Enright Ridge Eco-village, began "looking up and down the valley, thinking it would be nice to protect more," said Sisson, who joined the Western Wildlife Corridor organization in the early 2000s.

Imago created a committee in 1988, which morphed into an independent nonprofit in 1992, Sisson said.

Today, the Western Wildlife Corridor has close to 400 members, each paying at least a $25 membership fee.

Most are West Siders, but there is a scattering of members around the country.

Sisson, a Delhi Township resident, believes the group's work will never really be done.

The vision is to cobble together an uninterrupted natural corridor from Mill Creek to Oxbow, the latter a public land trust protecting wetlands at the area where the Great Miami River meets the Ohio River near Lawrenceburg, Indiana.

Some barriers likely will never be crossed, like a residential and business corridor in North Bend, Sisson said, but the organization will keep at it.

"I would really be surprised if even in 100 years it would all be protected," Sisson said. "But I think we can protect some really nice nuclei. Where visitors can see what the woods were like, enjoy it, use it to educate."

Group gains trust

There's a lot of learning already going on along the corridor.

UC Professor Conover takes his biology students to Bender Mountain, Western Wildlife Corridor's largest and most easily accessible property, often.

In Conover's opinion, the property off of Bender Road in Delhi Township is the region's best example of what native forests probably looked like around here before globalization sped up the invasion of nonnative plants in America.

Volunteers have never replanted anything at the corridor's preserves, Sisson said.

Native seeds and bulbs remained in the soil, waiting for the chance to grow.

Visitors literally can see the difference.

Stand at the boundary line of a Western Wildlife property and the forest floor is visible on the preserve side. On the other side is a wall of honeysuckle.

When Sisson tromps around the properties he carries a little squirt bottle of herbicide and pruners, always at the ready. He sometimes thinks of his childhood home in Addyston, just a half a mile from the Kirby property and future nature center.

When he was 9, he would ride his brown gelding horse, Dynamite, through those hills. It makes him very happy to know that they will be preserved, as will part of his parents' property, which they donated to the nonprofit years ago.

Several others have done the same, including Grant Kirby, who donated the 30-acre nature center property, including the house.

Sitting in the little house, Sisson points out where a Girl Scout troop has agreed to help install a picture window. Beyond the glass there are plans for a bird bath, bird houses and feeders. He hopes a native prairie will begin to grow once they clean up the western yard.

He imagines the nature center will be open every day.