Mike Zieker spent years working in a park near a bald eagle nest in central Colorado.
But the 55-year-old ranger was almost speechless as he tried to describe the sight of a raptor diving for fish on the bank of the Willamette River — something he often witnesses as he walks the trails at Minto-Brown Island Park.
“I still stop what I’m doing when I see an eagle. It never gets old,” he said.
Zieker is Salem’s first and only city park ranger, responsible for patrolling the city’s 91 parks, trails and natural areas. He enforces park rules, mostly by educating people, and puts on programs to help teach Salemites of all ages about the city’s natural world.
“The goal of the park ranger is to protect the parks and the people in them,” he said.
That can take many forms. Recently, Zieker led a three-day junior ranger summer camp for about a dozen kids ages 9 to 11, teaching them to cast a rod and walking them through efforts to preserve turtle habitat at Minto-Brown.
“I like to say that they’re learning by accident,” he said, speaking over the whir of unspooling fish lines as kids tried to catch colorful plastic fish on the park lawn. “It’s not school and we don’t want it to be.”
Teaching is the highlight of his work, Zieker said. Much of it comes in one-on-one conversations with people where he’s educating them on park rules, like why keeping a dog on a leash is important, even if the dog is well-behaved.
People are usually receptive, he said, and he’s always happy to explain the rationale behind a rule.
“Not every law makes sense,” Zieker said. But parks rules and regulations, designed to keep the natural world, visitors and animals safe, usually do, he said, which makes the job easier.
Zieker grew up in upstate New York and said his love of being outside grew out of a love of animals. He began guiding in the Adirondack Mountains out of high school and thought about becoming a teacher, but said he was only interested in environmental education — a specialty that barely existed at the time.
He graduated from Oregon State University and became a state park ranger shortly after, starting in 2005 at Detroit Lake. The job, he said, was “getting paid to walk around all day and interact with people who are enjoying themselves.” He was hooked.
Soon after, he moved to Colorado, his wife’s home state, and took a job with their state parks department. He returned to Oregon and began working for the city in 2017.
“This was always really what I wanted to do,” he said.
He tries to visit parks regularly, though not on a set schedule. He works a 40-hour week, he said, but doesn’t disclose his hours publicly for safety and so people can’t plan misbehavior around it. After years on the job, he has a sense when a park might need attention.
“Every park tends to have its own sort of rhythms,” he said.
The ranger job began in Salem’s compliance department, meaning Zieker’s co-workers were charged with enforcing city codes and parking violations. City officials planned to add two more rangers last year, but scrapped the new jobs amid budget cuts.
Homeless camping has become a larger issue in parks since Zieker started working. He doesn’t generally respond to large encampments like the one at Wallace Marine Park, leaving that to dedicated city teams. But if a single tent springs up in a park or Zieker notices someone living in their car at a park, he’ll talk to them, explain park rules and try to direct them to help.
Zieker’s work goes beyond writing tickets or talking to people about littering. He manages the city’s volunteer eagle nest watch program and leads Owl Prowls, two-mile guided walks at dusk searching for signs of the elusive raptor at Minto-Brown.
The group doesn’t always see owls but “we usually encounter them,” he said, mostly hearing them hoot or finding owl pellets.
This summer, his job moved from compliance services to the parks department. The hope, said his supervisor Amanda Sitter, is to make education about nature and city parks a greater part of the ranger’s job.
Zieker said if he had to choose, Minto-Brown would be his favorite city park. Its dual status as a city park and wildlife reserve is a rarity among municipal parks “which I think makes it really special,” he said.
But he’s impressed by the breadth of the city’s system, and said Salem is home to many hidden gems — neighborhood parks that often aren’t well known except by the people who live close to them.
On his days off, Zieker doesn’t visit Salem’s parks. He and his wife will go camping elsewhere, but he said he’d have trouble keeping to himself and not enforcing rules.
“We’re not getting more parks. We gotta protect the ones we got,” he said.
Contact reporter Rachel Alexander: [email protected] or 503-575-1241.
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Rachel Alexander is Salem Reporter’s managing editor. She joined Salem Reporter when it was founded in 2018 and covers city news, education, nonprofits and a little bit of everything else. She’s been a journalist in Oregon and Washington for a decade. Outside of work, she’s a skater and board member with Salem’s Cherry City Roller Derby and can often be found with her nose buried in a book.
