Pole Green Park

Description

Pole Green Park is a multi-use facility with sports fields, picnic areas, playgrounds, a dog park, and community center surrounded by hardwood forest. The mix of habitats makes for an especially rich concentration of wildlife for a suburban park.

Two connecting loop trails meander for a combined 1.3 miles through woods on the eastern portion of the park. The main trailhead is located behind the pavilion across from the dog park. Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and woodpeckers are just a few of the year-round residents. Summer brings red-eyed vireos, blue-gray gnatcatchers, acadian flycatchers, and more to the treetops. Warblers, tanagers, and vireos take advantage of these woods during migration.

Scan the creek from either side of this bridge to look for amphibians and bathing birds. Photo Credit: Lisa Mease/DWR

The central portion of Pole Green Park is where the playgrounds and sports fields are concentrated. Turkey vultures, red-shouldered hawks, and the occasional bald eagle are most easily spotted here. Eastern bluebirds and eastern phoebes scan for insects from almost every fence while mixed flocks of red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds pick their way through the grass until they’re flushed into the air by a noise or passing person.

Inside the mowed grass path of the 5-kilometer Pole Green Park cross country course is a meadow habitat frequented by flycatchers, swifts, and swallows hawking for insects, sparrows and finches feasting on seeds, and eastern meadowlarks hiding in the tall grass. Pollinators and grasshoppers find this area irresistible, too.

Listen for eastern meadowlarks concealed in the tall grass along the 5K cross country trail. Photo Credit: Lisa Mease/DWR

Directions

Physical Address: 8996 Pole Green Park Ln. Mechanicsville, VA 23116

From I-295, take Exit #38A/Pole Green Road. Follow Pole Green Road east for 3.9 miles. Turn left onto Pole Green Park Lane. The entrance is 0.2 miles on the right on Pole Green Drive.