Story Photos
 Photo by Bill Wagner When shorebirds skim over the flats along the Willapa Bay shoreline, they search for places free of spartina grass to feed. |
Wildlife on Willapa
Saturday, May 3, 2003 9:36 AM PDT
By Eric Apalategui
Printable version
E-mail this articleNAHCOTTA -- Like customers at a 7-Eleven, migrating shorebirds that steal onto Willapa Bay's mud flats for a fast snack are under the constant lens of video cameras.
The birds aren't under surveillance to thwart shoplifting. Instead, all of those dunlins and dowitchers, western sandpipers and black-bellied plovers, are unsuspecting subjects of a new research project to determine where shorebirds get their groceries.
Washington State University researcher Kim Patten has only just begun his study, but to a great extent he already knows what he'll find: shorebirds shun the dense meadows of spartina grass taking over the shallow bay, one of the most important refueling stops for shorebirds migrating up the West Coast this spring.
He is among federal, state, university and industry partners trying to eradicate thousands of acres of spartina, an eastern native. But he's the first to take a scientific look at how spartina harms birds -- and how best to restore the habitat once the spartina is gone.
"You still have skeptics out there that do not believe spartina affects shorebirds," he said. "It's in part to justify what we're doing" in the multimillion-dollar campaign to wipe out spartina, which is kicking into higher gear this summer.
On Wednesday, Patten trained binoculars on a spartina meadow for four hours and spotted no shorebird species -- just a flitting marsh wren and gangly great blue heron.
Nearby, volunteers working with Patten and the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge counted 30,000 shorebirds pecking worms, midges, nematodes and other critters from the open mud flats that shorebirds prefer.
"The only thing that is definitive is that if you have untreated spartina, you don't have shorebird use," said Charlie Stenvall, the refuge manager who found $10,000 to start Patten's study. "That's obvious."
In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Willapa refuge to protect habitat for migrating birds.
Patten expects his research to:
- Scientifically prove informal observations that shorebirds require open flats to feed
- Determine which spartina eradication tactics bring shorebirds back most effectively.
Patten's team fixed five cameras to poles driven six feet into the mud. Nearby, platforms on tripods made of alder and spruce poles hold up protected VCRs and the marine batteries and solar panels that power the equipment. Peregrine falcons, once an endangered raptor, also make use of the platforms to dine on dunlins and dowitchers they kill at the bay.
One of the cameras looks out over native mud flats and another overlooks dense spartina. The other three record bird activity on former spartina meadows -- one area treated with herbicide alone, another sprayed and mowed and a third unsprayed but rototilled.
Patten won't be able to review the videotapes until after the spring migration, but he is monitoring birds in the same areas in two more ways: one, volunteers count birds using binoculars and, two, Patten measures the density of bird footprints and droppings in the mud.
So far, shorebirds have avoided the spartina, where there is food but where shorebirds won't tread for fear of hiding predators. "If the birds can't access (forage), it doesn't really matter what's there."
The flats where spartina has never taken root still get the densest flocks as the tides flow in. Patten and Stenvall are encouraged that the birds also quickly returned to treated areas, including flats that haven't been tilled, which is slow and expensive.
"This is some of the stuff that we don't know," Stenvall said. "This is just great stuff."
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