Boise Abounds With Wildlife, Including Students

Neighborhoods here are defined by their wildlife.

In the city’s historic North End, hundreds of squirrels chatter at you endlessly. They scamper back and forth across the telephone lines, harass neighborhood cats and swish their tails in defiance as they run off.

In southeast, it’s waterfowl. Ducks fly over constantly, due partly to the proximity of the Boise River. Geese honk. Osprey glide overhead. In the wintertime, bald eagles make their nests along the river.

In Boise’s foothills, it’s quail. It’s not uncommon to see coveys of the graceful birds scooting across your driveway.

Out in the southwest part of town, where subdivisions still are interspersed with farmland, pheasants make their homes.

It’s Boise’s “diversity of habitats” that draws all the wildlife, says Chuck Harris, a wildlife research biologist for the state Department of Fish & Game. There are the dry, sagebrush-covered hills. The lush riverbanks.

Harris has designed his own northeast Boise back yard to attract birds, with berry bushes, a pond and “bird feeders all over the place.”

None of that’s necessary in downtown Boise, where the primary form of wildlife is pigeons. Boise State students run a close second.

Don’t try this at home

Lots of cities have had their downtowns decline and then come back. But Boise’s story is among the most dramatic.

Twenty years ago, city fathers decided what their downtown really needed was a big, enclosed shopping mall. So they bought up and razed whole blocks of the downtown to make way for the mall.

The problem was, no one particularly wanted to build a mall downtown. So Boise passed a law saying no big shopping mall could be built anywhere but downtown. The result? No mall was built. Boiseans resorted to buying their clothes at Kmart.

The blocks that were leveled for the mall stayed as “temporary” graveled parking lots for two decades. The phrase most commonly used to describe downtown a decade ago was “a bombed-out Beirut.”

Finally, in the late 1980s the powers that be gave up on the downtown mall. A big, shiny mall was built out by the freeway. The bare downtown blocks gradually began filling in with office towers, shops, restaurants. Boiseans’ fashion sense improved.

The job’s not complete. Some historic buildings downtown remain vacant and owned by the city. One block still is bare. Downtown never got the big, new department store everyone wanted.

But building-by-building, private developers have been taking back the downtown.

When downtown first was starting to perk up, the redevelopment agency decided to launch an event called “Alive After Five in the Grove,” with free live music, to try to convince folks who worked downtown that there could be life there after 5 p.m. During the downtown’s lean years, office workers scurried home, leaving the downtown streets to hordes of teenage cruisers.

I went to Alive After Five last week and nearly got crushed by the crowds. There were at least a thousand people there. In the ladies’ room, I heard this conversation: “I meant to come at 4:30 to get a table with an umbrella.” “Oh, didn’t you know? The tables with the umbrellas are all gone by 3 now.”

Downtown lives.

, DataTimes MEMO: North-South Notes runs every other Sunday. To reach Betsy Z. Russell, call 336-2854 or fax to 336-0021.