On Saturday, October 4, 22 birders awoke before sunrise, loaded into vans, and began our journey from Northern Virginia to Cape May, NJ, our eyes set on this faraway destination perfectly aligned with the Atlantic Flyway, one of the four “avian superhighways” in North America.
Northern Virginia’s stream and river water quality is not great. Although agriculture is the largest contributor by far of nutrient and sediment loads in Virginia’s streams, rivers, and the Chesapeake Bay, urban and suburban stormwater runoff is the second largest and the fastest growing contributor to these pollutants.
Most corporate properties have pretty “standard” landscaping, meaning the plants do very little if anything to support the local ecosystem. More and more, though, we are seeing innovative landscape designs on commercial properties that demonstrate the potential for corporations to be leaders in the effort to save the natural world, starting on their own land.
