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Wildlife agencies partner with Mills River to plant 15-acre pollinator meadow

(L-R) Aaron Davenport, Bryan Tompkins, and Kai Picciano walk behind a seed drill, ensuring everything is working properly.

By Gary Peeples, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Published: March 9, 2024

On an overcast Friday morning, a small team gathered, coffee mugs in hand, on the edge of a public park in Mills River, the occasional walker or jogger passing by. It was planting day.

The town of Mills River was incorporated in 2003, stretching from Pisgah National Forest in the west, to the French Broad River in the east. A focal point of the community, and site of the town hall, is the 48-acre Mills River Park. It has typical local park amenities — playgrounds, sports fields, courts, a paved walking path. But the park also nods to the natural heritage of the area. With two river access points, the park is an easy put-in or take-out for paddlers and is a stop on the state’s recently launched snorkel trail, providing the opportunity for swimmers to take a look at life beneath the surface, including the endangered Appalachian elktoe mussel. Nearly half the park’s land sits in the Mills River floodplain and instead of using that space for sports fields, which would need repair after every flood, the town opted for a low-maintenance pollinator meadow.

The field will be a mixture of wildflowers and native grasses, complementing a previously installed pollinator garden, and is the culmination of a lot of teamwork at the local, state, and federal levels. The town of Mills River provided the land — Mills River Town Park — and a vision for the park that incorporated the pollinator meadow. The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission provided the equipment — a tractor and seed drill that simultaneously cuts the soil surface and drops seed into the cut — and staff to operate it, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided technical support in planning the meadow and funding for seeds through its Partners for Fish and Wildlife program.

The team convened at the park on a February Friday morning. The Service’s Bryan Tompkins, Mills River’s Parks and Recreation Director Nicole Sweat and Wes Humphries and Kai Picciano of the N.C. Wildlife Resource Commission loaded the seed drill, ran a short test strip to ensure everything was working as needed, and then Humphries set to planting with Picciano and fellow commission staffer Aaron Davenport keeping the seed drill loaded. They planted 200 pounds of wildflower and native grass seed on 15 acres of flood-prone land.