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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 PointĘcounting 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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“Oyster growers
have always been environmentalists to a point. We have
to be, because we need clean water.” -John Herrold
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