City officials cut the ribbon on the Auburn Environmental Park’s bird and observation tower off Western Avenue Monday afternoon, seven months after its frosty December ground breaking.

Made of wood, steel, and recycled materials, the birding tower combines lower, intermediate, and upper platforms for people who want to gawk at the wildlife and birds in the wetland below. An ADA-accessible trail leads viewers to the intermediate and upper platforms, and a trail and 30-foot ramp brings them to the lower ramp.

“This is a great thing,” declared Nancy Streiffert, president of the Rainier Audubon Society. “It’s in the wetlands area, and people should be able to see a lot of swallows and hawks, more open land sort of things.”

And, Seiffert noted, they will see bats, bats of the insect-gulping, not the blood sucking, sort.

“They’ve built bat boxes, and there are bats here in the evenings,” said Streiffert, “That’s cool. They are talking about putting in native plants, which is my interest at the moment and would encourage more native birds to come.”

The Rainier Audubon Society, which has been involved with the project from the beginning and helped decide the tower’s location, donated $1,000 toward native plantings.

A grant from the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office provided funds.

Mike Perry, CEO of Auburn-based Forest Concepts, developed the special wood straw that blankets the ground under the tower.

“It was designed for post-wildfire rehab erosion control,” Perry said of the wood straw. “In the past two years, we have delivered 5,000 tons of it to the U.S. Forest Service. We’re happy to help with this project, and we had a ball doing it.”

The tower is just one component of an ambitious plan to make something good out of the troublesome wetland that the Department of Transportation’s construction of Highway 167 left behind between West Main and 15th Street Northwest 40 years ago. By damming an area comprised mainly of long-fallow farmland, city officials claimed, the state silted up Mill Creek, vexing engineers for years.

It will be built in two phases, the first consisting of about 120 acres east of Highway 167, the second west of the highway also about 120 acres.

Auburn City Councilman Rich Wagner said will be a teaching park. He said the City is working with Green River Community College and Washington State University to facilitate research and educational projects there.

“WSU is doing it through the Insitute for Sustainable Design, which is a part of the engineering department at WSU and Science and Environmental Studies Group at GRCC. We expect beginning this fall that there will be students who do particular research or learning projects that are related to the park,” Wagner said.

The park’s master plan also calls for trails and restrooms. In 2007 the City installed an information kiosk, a trailhead and park, the tower represents the first major recreation feature.

Auburn Mayor Pete Lewis called the park “an innovative project that creates more open space in the urban area for generations to come. This is not just about building a facility that drains an area, this is about creating something for generations of people to come to from throughout the entire Puget Sound Region where they can see an environmental park, one kept in nature, used so people can study nature, right in the heart of an urban area. We know that this area will become more urbanized as the decades pass.

“…Cities plan for centuries. and this is the type of project we can look forward to our grandchildren and our great grandchildren using even more than we might today,” Lewis added.

Kelly McLain Aardahl, the City’s environmental protection manager, said the next order of business is trails.”The city owns all the property from West Main Street out to a couple hundred feet south of 15th Street Northwest,” said McLain Aardal. “Our goal is to have a trail system that goes all way throughout this entire area and ties into the Interurban trail, and right now we are working on a design. We hope to get started with construction this summer.”

Lewis said the City always welcomes volunteer help.

Craig Tucker, owner of Buckley-based C Tucker LLC Construction, said between last winter’s floods and snow, building the tower involved a bit more excitement than he had expected.

“I was pretty skeptical at first about a bird viewing tower in the middle of Auburn,” said the Auburn native, “but over time we’ve seen quite a bit of wildlife out here,” said Tucker.

Gray and Osborne provided the structural engineering.