The Nature Conservancy in Washington - Spotlight Archives: 2007

Growing a Woodland, Acorn by Acorn
A pilot project to restore an oak woodlands, home to white-breasted nuthatches and western bluebirds, is taking root in the Swauk Valley in Kittitas County.
Learn About This Acorn-by-Acorn Effort

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a ...???
Imagine you are a tree canopy researcher. You're hanging from a rope 120 feet above the ground, collecting samples from a thick mat of moss on a branch of an ancient spruce tree. What would you expect to find? Nature Conservancy scientists climbed into the trees at Ellsworth Creek this fall looking for insects — and made a surprising discovery.
See What They Found

Shorebirds Find Flooded Farm Fields
Where would you go to find sandpipers, phalaropes, dowitchers, and other shorebirds? In Skagit County, you might head for the farm. An experiment in working with farmers to create habitat appears to be paying off in its early days.
Get the Whole Skagit Story

Listen in on Washington’s Native Bats

When the “click, click, click” of a spotted bat ticks through a starry night in Moses Coulee, you should know that there are possibly another dozen species of bats flying around that you can’t hear at all. Until now, that is!
Find Out How We're Listening In on Washington's Native Bats

Endangered Rabbits Beat the Odds
When researchers who had reared endangered pygmy rabbits in captivity prepared to release them into central Washington’s Sagebrush Flats this spring, they whispered warnings against raptors and coyotes to the tiny critters. And initial reports were discouraging — within days of their release, half of the eight females had been lost to predators. But in June, biologist Len Zeoli made a breathtaking discovery!
Find Out What Happened to the Pygmy Rabbit

Chainsaw Habitat Creation
Conservancy biologist Sanders Freed is climbing trees and wielding a chainsaw to make life better for bluebirds, wood ducks, bats, and western gray squirrels on prairie lands at Fort Lewis. Find out how his efforts are paying off here.
Find Out More about This Work

Conservation Work at Fort Lewis

Young people from Tacoma are bringing a grass-choked salmon stream on Fort Lewis back to productive life and getting paid for it in a new partnership between the Tacoma Urban League and the Conservancy. For some of them, it’s their first encounter with the non-urban world.
Learn More about This Breakthrough Partnership

Beating Back Knotweed on the Sauk River
Knotweed is a nasty invasive weed that invades river banks and gravel bars and chokes out other vegetation. But we’re beating it back on the Sauk River, east of Mount Vernon, where Conservancy volunteers and staff and a Washington Conservation Corps crew spent three days eradicating patches of the noxious plant. They’re making progress: Where they found 200 patches last year, this year they found only about 20.
Read About How They're Doing It

Building a Home for Olympia Oysters
Olympia oysters were once the pride of the West Coast, beloved for their clean, tangy taste. Pollution and overharvesting nearly wiped out the tiny native bivalve. However, we’ve found that there are still Olympia oysters around to repopulate those inlets, if only they had a hard substrate to which they could attach.
Discover How We're Helping Them

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Jim Evans/TNC; © Yoav Bar-Ness/TNC; © Kirsten Morse; © John Musser/BLM; © Len Zeoli; © Sanders Freed/TNC; © Ann Anderson; © Jamie Glasgow; © TNC; © Betsy Lyons/TNC