Walling Pond is For Sale. Here's Why the City Should Buy It.

Families fishing at Walling Pond, a former quarry pond in Salem, Oregon, that has served as a popular fishing destination for decades.

Leanna Heiman first came across Walling Pond as part of a volunteer effort to rescue feral cats. Despite its location in an industrial zone, the 9.8-acre quarry pond and adjacent land proved to be excellent cat habitat. Leanna reports that she and her husband have rescued, treated, and rehomed 19 cats to date.

The pond is home not only to feral cats but also to a range of stocked game fish, courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Salemites have been fishing there since the 1970s. My colleague on the Planning Commission, Commissioner Infante, shared a memory of taking his children to Walling Pond to fish.

Walling Pond is now for sale, and Leanna is rallying support for the City to purchase the land. The Salem Parks and Recreation Advisory Board gave her their enthusiastic support. I’m pleased to share that the Salem Planning Commission unanimously voted to support her idea as well.

While quarry lakes are not natural features, where there is water, there is life.

The pond supports not only stocked fish but also a variety of birds, including ducks, geese, Great Blue Herons, and Osprey. I'm not aware of any systematic wildlife inventory for Walling Pond, but I suspect the list of animals using the pond and surrounding land would be longer than we might think. Research has demonstrated that urban landscapes can support considerable wildlife diversity, including in artificial habitats such as ponds (Aronson et al., 2014; Hassall, 2014) and engineered bioswales (Filazzola et al., 2019; Bjørn & Howe, 2023).

Yet this ecological potential is not always incorporated into how we plan and manage urban land.

Cities, especially lower-density cities like Salem, have a wide variety of what landscape ecologists call “patches.” Patches are simply areas of land that differ from their surroundings. Depending on how closely we look, a patch might be an entire neighborhood, a park, a woodland, or a small wetland.

Salem’s landscape patches include our central business district, residential neighborhoods, commercial corridors, industrial areas, schools, parks, and natural areas. Together, these individual patches make up our urban landscape mosaic.

One interesting feature of this patch-mosaic model is that it works at different spatial scales.

Let’s look at my neighborhood park, Wendy Kroger Park, as an example. It has an open central lawn where people play with their dogs and children practice soccer drills. My son, Ben, and I launched model rockets there one afternoon when he was young. It has a playground for younger children and a basketball court for children of all ages. There are planting beds with ornamental plants at the park’s entrance.

The park’s most significant ecological features are a remnant Oregon White Oak woodland, a small stream, its riparian zone, and connected uplands. Each of these areas—lawn, playground, basketball court, planting beds, woodland, stream, riparian corridor, and uplands—provides different resources that support different organisms, including us.

We can do the opposite as well and zoom out to look at a larger landscape. Marion County is an example. It is a mosaic of cities, industrial zones, mineral extraction areas, farms and orchards, timber plantations, parks, and (somewhat) protected forests. As we zoom out, we may lose details, but we can see patterns, obstacles, and opportunities for connecting habitats and improving the ecological health of the larger landscape.

Running through this landscape mosaic is a network of rivers, streams, wetlands, and floodplains that connects the Cascades to the Willamette River. This blue network provides the paths that salmon follow to the ocean and back, and that cougars and bears use to search out new territories. It supports mink, river otters, and beavers throughout their life cycles, and sustains the fish, amphibians, birds, insects, and other organisms whose activities maintain the ecological health of our streams, wetlands, and riparian landscapes.

There’s a second network that crosses these lands: the streets and highways that connect us to one another and to the places we live, work, and visit. We need them, but, as we know, this network fragments natural habitats into smaller, more isolated patches. Roads also cause an enormous amount of animal mortality.

We can’t live without our cities or roads, as much as some of us may like to. So, what can we do to meet our immediate needs while recognizing our dependence on functioning natural systems?

We need to lean into the idea of a city as a landscape mosaic. To achieve this, we need to identify, protect, and where appropriate, acquire urban lands whose value lies more in their environmental potential than their development potential. These environmentally significant lands—streams, wetlands, floodplains, parks, engineered bioswales, and natural areas—together create a blue-green patchwork that supports the plants, wildlife, and ecological processes upon which healthy and successful communities depend.

Walling Pond is an obvious choice to add to Salem’s existing blue-green patchwork. Although located in an industrial zone, the property has relatively little developable land, limiting its economic value. Its ecological and recreational potential, however, is considerable. Pringle Creek runs through the property and is connected to the pond, making Walling Pond part of Salem’s larger blue network.

Public ownership would give the City an opportunity to improve aquatic and riparian habitats, strengthen the ecological health of the Pringle Creek corridor, and preserve a popular fishing destination for future generations. Walling Pond is precisely the kind of property whose greatest value lies not in what we can build on it, but in what it can contribute to a healthier, more livable city.

If you like the idea of Salem purchasing Walling Pond, please share your support with the City of Salem by emailing the City Council here. I also encourage you to join the Friends of Walling Pond on Facebook here.