Vegetation and Wildlife
Dominant plants in the Tryon Creek watershed are red alder, bigleaf maple, Douglas-fir, Western redcedar, and Western hemlock. The forest understory in the park includes many trilliums, celebrated each spring during the park's Trillium Festival. More than 90 species of wildflower such as fringecup are found in the park as well as plants such as sword fern.
More than 50 species of birds as well as small mammals such as beaver inhabit the park. Tryon Creek is among the few streams in the Portland metropolitan area with a run of steelhead trout, and coho salmon have been recorded spawning in the creek. Water striders, invertebrates that can walk on water, are common in the pools of Tryon Creek.
Read more about this topic: Tryon Creek State Natural Area
Famous quotes containing the words vegetation and/or wildlife:
“We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are layed waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)