Habitat Restoration
at Lighthouse Point and Renwick Woods
Ithaca, New York
Cayuga Bird Club efforts to improve bird habitat in seasonally flooded forests at the south end of Cayuga Lake
The seasonally flooded forests at the south end of Cayuga Lake historically covered many hundreds of acres and provided important breeding and migratory stop-over sites for both resident birds and neotropical migratory species. Because of the steep-sided hills and other topographic features of the area, these forests and their unique native-plant assemblages provided a very different kind of habitat resource for birds than surrounding forests on well-drained land. Since the early 1900s, fragmentation of these forests by development pressures, drainage to support human uses, and incursion by non-native invasive species have reduced the utility of these habitats for birds.
In 2018, the Conservation Action Committee of the Cayuga Bird Club developed a set of goals to guide their actions over the next three years, and to provide a geographic focus for their activities. Improving bird habitat in and around the remaining seasonally flooded forests, especially Renwick Woods just south of Stewart Park and Lighthouse Point Woods just north of Newman golf course, became the priority geographic focus for the committee. These two patches of woods (about 25 acres and 15 acres, respectively) are all that remain of a forested wetland that stretched originally from near the lakeshore all the way back to Ithaca Falls along Fall Creek in the City of Ithaca. See map for perspective.
This map of the south end of Cayuga Lake shows the extent of the original flooded forest habitat shaded in purple. Lighthouse Point and Renwick Woods are among the few remaining patches of this habitat.
Lighthouse Point Woods
At Lighthouse Point Woods, members of the Cayuga Bird Club worked with staff from the Cornell Botanic Gardens Natural Areas (which owns this parcel) to assess the diversity of trees and shrubs occurring in the woods. We also developed a map and a grid system of 10 meter by 10 meter plots to guide our progress as we worked to improve the area as habitat for birds.
Grid Map of Lighthouse Point (Geospatial PDF)
Since 2018, we have improved more than two dozen plots here in Lighthouse Point Woods by removing thousands of stems of non-native, invasive plant species and planting more than a dozen species of native trees and shrubs.
