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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