Environment
FDR Park is located on the Atlantic Coastal Plain, a hydrographic province which includes extreme southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. The Coastal Plain supports different plants and animals than the adjacent Piedmont of Pennsylvania. Because of the extreme development of the Coastal Plain in Pennsylvania, many of these distinctive plants and animals are rare in the state.
The ponds and lagoons are remnants of the tidal marsh and channel system which originally occupied the area between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. Diking, draining and filling of these marshes probably started with the first settlement of the area by the Swedes in the early 17th century, culminating in the installation of a tide gate designed to permit drainage from the park while minimizing inflow from the Delaware River.
The Pennsylvania Audubon Society has designated the park as an Important Bird Area (IBA). Birds that have natural habitat to watch for in the park are Shovelers, Gadwall, Wigeon, Ring-necks, Bufflehead, Redhead, Scaup, Ruddy's, Pintail, Pied-billed grebes, Snow Geese, Canada Goose, and herons.
Read more about this topic: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Park
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“Modern man’s capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanity’s capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)