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by Eric Apalategui . Photography by
Bill Wagner
The Columbia Basin Project
transformed a vast area of Washington from shrub-steppe to some of
the most fertile farmland anywhere. It also created extraordinary
habitat for birds and wildlife.
Headlights slice the darkness and fall on a coyote loping across
the gravel road. The coyote turns for a moment, and its carnivore
eyes flash in the beams before vanishing-swallowed in sagebrush
that quilts an aromatic blanket over the gentle hills.
From here, the dark land seems arid, stark, endless.
But when the car shudders over the next washboard rise, the
silent air explodes with a cacophony of ducks. The eastern horizon
lights up, and layers of flame and slate fall upon calm water,
backlighting the grassy hummocks that stretch as far as the first
glow of dawn. As the landscape awakens, a squadron of American
white pelicans sweeps across the sky, Caspian terns begin diving
for small fish, and great blue herons and egrets settle into their
hunting haunts along the shore. On the horizon, coyotes yip at the
fading moon.
Such bold contradictions clash daily where water meets desert in
Washington's Columbia Basin.
A sage in the brush
The clerk at our motel, who moved to Moses Lake from a
mountainous Oregon hamlet, calls her adopted region "ugly."
Among locals, you occasionally hear the word "wasteland" used to
describe sagebrush-studded lands that biologists prefer to call
native shrub steppe.
It's impossible to take such a harsh view when Robert Kent is
your guide to the Columbia Basin Wildlife Areas.
The preserved habitats are a vast collection of some 200,000
state-managed acres collected into more than a dozen wildlife areas
on federal and state lands within the basin. The complex of
wildlife areas is the largest in the state, a full 130 miles from
north to south and 500 miles around the edges.
Combining those wildlife areas with more than three times as
much irrigated farmland and tracts of high desert, the entire
Columbia Basin is a tapestry of colorful crops, diverse desert,
teeming wetlands, soaring cliffs, and deep coulees stretching
eastward from the Columbia River's big bend in central
Washington.
Kent ('75 Wildlife Management) retired last February after a
27-year career with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
He arrived in the Columbia Basin in 1981 and was promoted to
manager of the wildlife areas a few years later.
"I spent the rest of my career here," says Kent, who grew up on
a farm 70 miles to the east, survived war in Vietnam, and married
his high school sweetheart. "It was a good place to be for me."
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