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“All I’m doing is killing stuff”
For a bunch of bird-loving, oysters-on-the-half-shell types, the language used for ridding Willapa Bay of Spartina is downright militaristic.
“All I’m doing is killing stuff,” said Jonathan Bates, an equipment operator for the wildlife refuge, one day last July. At the time, he was rumbling across Spartina meadows aboard a tank-like tractor outfitted with sprayer nozzles to mist the grass with Rodeo herbicide.
Closer to the tide line, where smaller Spartina bunches called “clones” hadn’t yet formed meadows, airboat crews drew herbicide pistols and blasted the grass with blue-dyed herbicide.
“The plan,” says airboat crew leader Darrin Zavodsky, “was to divide and conquer.”
The tractors all are armed with GPS units to map their progress, and at least one has infrared sensors that signal the sprayer nozzles to fire only when it detects plant matter.
Last summer, the wildlife refuge, the Washington State Department of Agriculture, and the bay’s oyster growers treated Spartina on 5,000 acres in the bay. It was a landmark year: they killed nearly 10 times more grass than any previous year and, for the first time, gained ground against Spartina. This summer, partners including WSU and the University of Washington have mapped out a strategy to treat another 3,000 acres while mopping up new shoots on mudflats they treated in 2003.
Until 2003, more than a decade of spraying, mowing, and tilling Spartina had proven futile, while a UW study of plant-eating insects remains unproven. Stenvall, the wildlife refuge chief, credits WSU researcher Patten, whom he jokes is Willapa’s own “mad scientist,” with finding a way to make common herbicides kill the pesky grass in harsh conditions—without harming the bay’s fragile ecosystem.
This year, Patten’s work should bring a new weapon to their arsenal: federal and state agencies’ expected approval of imazapyr for use in the bay after Patten exhaustively tested the herbicide. Imazapyr, compared to Rodeo, requires less chemical and shorter drying times to kill Spartina.
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