Green roof on the entrance building at TNC’s South Cape May Meadows Preserve. (Cape May, New Jersey) Sep 2017 © The Nature Conservancy/Cara Byington

Thanks to Cool Green Science for this story from a migratory birding hotspot:

Give Me Shelter

BY CARA BYINGTON

I’m climbing a somewhat rickety ladder when it occurs to me (not for the first time) that I really shouldn’t be doing this.

It’s September. Fall migration is getting underway. And I am in the very heart of one of birding’s holiest of high holy places: Cape May, New Jersey, that small curve of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay where millions of birds spend at least some part of their lives, year over year, season over season.

I should be stalking warblers in the meadow not climbing a ladder to get up close and personal with, well, a roof.

Must Touch the Living Roof

In my defense, it’s not just any roof – it’s the new green (living) roof on the small building at the entrance to the Conservancy’s South Cape May Meadows Preserve. And it is lush and green, rippling with life and lined in stainless steel that looks like tarnished silver beneath the lowering sky.

It is a roof so alive it makes the building, with its weathered wooden sides, look like a natural part of the landscape, as if it had sprouted from the preserve’s native seed bed, like dune grasses or bayberry trees. And I really want to touch it…

Read the whole story here.