Nature Conservancy spearheads county’s largest land purchase ever for conservation
By Jim Haley
Herald Writer
STANWOOD — A great blue heron bobbed its head a couple of times, then jabbed its beak into the slow-moving slough water. It plucked out a finned morsel and devoured it.
Far away, deep in the marsh grass, a bald eagle circled and then plunged to the muddy surface. A group of gulls scattered, probably after being robbed of their lunch by the raptor.
It was all part of nature’s daily routine in an area important to fish, fowl and many other species of wildlife. It’s an area where salt water mingles with fresh before absorption by the sea.
This is the Stillaguamish River estuary where it meets Port Susan Bay. This also is an area where it’s guaranteed that the flow of nature will continue.
The Nature Conservancy has purchased 4,122 acres of mostly tidelands and salt marsh at the mouth of the river. The acquisition is the largest private purchase of land for conservation purposes in Snohomish County history, Nature Conservancy spokeswoman Leslie Brown said.
The conservation group paid a little more than $2 million for the land, including 160 acres of diked uplands, which in the past has been farmed. It was purchased from the estate of longtime Stanwood resident Menno Groeneveld, who died four years ago.
The purchase price of $2,030,000 was approved by Snohomish County Superior Court after the estate went into probate.
"This is an incredible acquisition," said David Weekes, state director of the Nature Conservancy of Washington. "With this purchase, some of the best remaining bird and fish habitat in the region is now protected forever."
In his will, Groeneveld said the property had been in his family more than 90 years. He never married, and his heirs included numerous relatives in the area and elsewhere.
The conservancy had been trying to acquire the property for 11 years. The purchase area stretches from the Skagit wildlife area in the north to Hat Slough in the south.The area includes tidally influenced channels and mud flats between Hat Slough and the main branch of the Stillaguamish.
The grassy mud flats are a part of the Pacific flyway, a resting and feeding place for migratory birds, said David Rolph, conservation biologist for the Nature Conservancy.
Birds migrating from the north find the Fraser River in British Columbia and the areas where the Skagit and Stillaguamish rivers meet the sea as their first resting spots.
"This is the first real lowland area with lots of food resources for them to stop and rest," Rolph said. "A lot of them stay here all winter. A lot of them keep moving south, so they use this as a staging area."
The bird population includes western sandpipers, dunlins and dowitchers, trumpeter swans, all kinds of raptors and as many as 50,000 Wrangell Island snow geese, which migrate here from and island off the Russian coast.
The Port Susan area has the "densest concentration of wintering and migratory birds in the region," Weekes added. Although private development of the areas likely wouldn’t have happened, Weekes said his group made the purchase to ensure that the area is permanently protected and well-managed.
The Nature Conservancy of Washington is part of an international organization that has helped protect nearly 62 million acres worldwide. It has about 37,000 members in this state, making it the largest membership-based conservation group in Washington, Brown said.
The Stillaguamish estuary purchase was made possible in part by a $600,000 corporate gift from WRQ Inc., a Seattle-based software developer, Brown added.
Funded through private donations and grants, the conservancy’s aim is to protect important areas such as the Port Susan Bay Preserve, she said.
Besides supporting birds, the river and estuaries at the mouth of the Stillaguamish also provide critical habitat for coho, chum and chinook salmon, as well as sea-run cutthroat trout.
"One of the principal reasons we’re so concerned with the salmon is the nutrients that they bring to the river and the ecosystem," said the Nature Conservancy’s Skagit area manager, Bob Carey.
"They add literally hundreds of tons of nutrients to the river and ecosystem, which feeds literally dozens of fish and wildlife species," Carey said.
"By protecting the estuarine habitat here, we’re helping to protect the upriver ecosystem," Carey added.
The Nature Conservancy plans to manage the property in a way that benefits the estuary wildlife as well as the public, Brown said. She said the conservancy someday will offer public viewing of the wildlife, although it hasn’t developed a management plan.
State director Weekes said such public education is important.
"It’s critical for people to understand the natural values present in our own backyard," he said.
You can call Herald Writer Jim Haley at 425-339-3447
or send e-mail to haley@heraldnet.com.
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