Carpenter's Woods -

Wissahickon Valley Park

Carpenter's Woods is a 37-acre section of Wissahickon Valley Park. The Wissahickon Valley is an 1,800-acre forested gorge running through Philadelphia's Fairmount Park and continuing through Montgomery County's Ft. Washington State Park. One of the oldest forests in the valley is Carpenter's Woods. The woods are named for a wealthy businessman who had a natural history museum on his estate and associated with the naturalists of his time, including John James Audubon. In 1921, due to the efforts of Caroline Moffett, a conservationist and principal of the nearby Charles W. Henry School, Carpenter's Woods became Philadelphia's first bird sanctuary. It was designated as an Important Bird Area by the National Audubon Society in 2005. Its varied habitat, including its unusual concentration of ancient trees, allows it to host diverse species of breeding birds, including Eastern Screech-owls and Pileated Woodpeckers, and makes it a migration hotspot, especially for warblers and thrushes. Among the ancient trees are large white oaks, black oaks, northern red oaks, American beech, black tupelo, tulip-poplar, and sassafras, many of them more than 200 years old. It is true urban old growth.