DESTINATION // The Birds Win!
by Robert Caverly
Ospreys have a straightforward method of fishing: The hawk hovers at great heights, then drops into the water with a crash. It’s utilitarian. And it’s also well-suited to the refuge’s environment of shallow, marshy, and brackish waters. The osprey happens to thrive in this boggy corner of South Philadelphia because of a decades-long conservation showdown that resulted in the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum.
There are few pieces of Philadelphia’s environment in the last half-century more contested than the refuge. Its existence was complicated because it sits at the perfect nexus of human and avian migration. As post-World War II Philadelphia stretched its industrial elbows, these transportation corridors clashed: the avian Atlantic Flyway on one side, and the most hated of East Coast highways, I-95, and its access to the Philly International Airport, on the other.
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