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 by Eric Apalategui • photography by Bill Wagner
Charlie Stenvall skims an airboat across Willapa Bay on a placid summer morning, rousing 15 Canada geese whose complaints sound like an unsupervised junior high band practice.
Ahead, flocks of western sandpipers flash white and gray, as the shorebirds turn away from the approaching boat in choreographed waves of wings. Nearby, a Caspian tern dives into shallows after small fish, while in the distance two peregrine falcons flush wading birds off open mudflats. A bald eagle perches in a snag on the shore of the bay’s forested Long Island, watching the boat pass below.
With a turn of the giant fan, Stenvall slides the boat down an alley of inch-deep water and enters an expanse of grass growing thicker than field corn.
Stenvall, manager of the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, steers into a pocket of water enclosed in a wall of green. He cuts the airboat’s engine, and the rumble of the fan blades whirs to a stop. Then, near silence. The honking of geese and screech of raptors fade into the light breeze, replaced by the faint scritch of swaying blades of grass.
To the newcomer, the lush meadows, broken only by vein-like channels that gather the outgoing tide, might seem like some of nature’s best work. But to Stenvall, the silent savanna sends an earsplitting message that precious Willapa Bay—tucked into Washington’s rainy southwestern pocket—is in peril.
The culprit isn’t the belching factories, agricultural runoff, and urban sprawl that endanger most of the nation’s great bays. Instead, the scariest threat to Willapa is this spreading carpet of grass, Spartina
alterniflora.
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