Keeping Birds Outdoors

by Tom Butler

Remember the campground pit toilets of old? Oh, the horror. The horror. Brave users would burst out gasping, eyes streaming, only to be revived with a charred hot dog and bottle of Grape Nehi. Modern vault toilets surely eclipse most other inventions of the past century. A large black plastic vent pipe on the south side of the building opens into an underground concrete vault. When the pipe warms up in the sun, the air in it rises. That rising air pulls air in through the only other opening, the seat, which then pulls fresh outside air into the room. It’s an elegantly simple solution to a problem that has tormented outhouse users since the beginning of, ahem, facilities.

As I’m sure you know, big hollow trees are great places for many birds to roost and/or nest, especially owls, but increasingly rare in modern forests. Those big vent pipes look like beautifully hollow trees from the air, though, and plastic pipes are slick. Once entered, there’s no getting out, leading to an appalling end for curious explorers.

*Vault with leaf screen at Bogachiel trailhead. Photo by Tom Butler*

Some agencies had started to screen their vent stacks, but the pre-made screens are sort of expensive, and of course so is crewtime. OPAS became aware that our underfunded Olympic National Park had not yet screened their vents. Numerous, but futile requests over several years to the short-handed park was cultivating an unfortunate rift between two otherwise closely allied organizations.

My phone call to ONP’s director of maintenance in spring of 2020 led to the loan of a good ladder and list of their thirty-five or so vault toilet locations. I’d been tripping over some scraps of wire mesh at home and am rich enough to donate a few construction screws. The makeshift screens are just as effective as the commercial variety, and with only two screws, cheaper and safer to install. The Forest Service got wind of my screening, so I was invited for a tour of about fifteen of their toilets as well.

Put quite a few miles on the old Subaru, but getting to all those remote locations sprinkled about our lovely peninsula was beautiful and interesting. I also love covering my shirt with potato chip crumbs while driving lonely roads. Some of the stacks were high enough to exercise my lifelong fear of heights, which is probably a good thing, and I also developed a very good working appreciation of the terms “windward” and “leeward.”