Stepping-stone for birds
Patten, an expert in small-fruit horticulture, naturally spends
many workdays in the greenhouses and bogs at the Cranberry Research
Station on the Long Beach Peninsula, the 25-mile finger of land
that separates Willapa Bay from the Pacific Ocean. At other times,
he’s testing ways to kill Spartina or burrowing shrimp that
plague the oyster industry.
On a spring day last year, however, Patten was up to his
wader-encased shins in Willapa Bay mud off Porter PointÊcounting
bird poop. The whitish plops, along with stick-like footprints, are
helping Patten document where migrating birds feed during stopovers
at Willapa Bay. He also employs high-tech surveillance cameras
mounted on platforms in the bay and lower-tech surveys with
binocular-armed volunteers to collect his data.
Patten’s research isn’t complete, but his aim is to
scientifically document what he and various bird experts already
know from observation: shorebirds, whether dunlins and dowitchers
or sandpipers and plovers, HATE Spartina.
“You still have skeptics out there that do not believe
Spartina affects shorebirds,” Patten says.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established Willapa National
Wildlife Refuge in 1937 to protect habitat for migrating birds. But
as Spartina has thickened, Willapa’s legions of shorebirds
have thinned.
Shorebirds flock to unspoiled tidal flats to peck for worms,
midges, nematodes, and other critters that make up the “groceries”
that fuel the birds’ long migrations along the West Coast. Some
also will forage among the stubble and wrack of dead
Spartina, but they won’t venture into living meadows where
predators might lurk.
“Willapa Bay is one of the few stepping-stones of habitat left
for migrating birds from South and Central America to Canada and
Alaska,” says Nina Carter, policy director for Audubon Washington.
She helped lobby her national organization to train a spotlight on
Willapa’s disappearing habitat for short-billed dowitchers and tens
of thousands of other shorebirds that migrate through each
year.
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