Land Trust Wins Major Funding to Protect High-Value Coastal Habitat
By Eric Erler, Marine Conservation Initiative Project Manager

Sound View Camp has a spectacular nearshore complex that includes barrier beach, lagoon, feeder bluff, saltmarsh, tideland and other habitats. Photo courtesy WA Dept. of Ecology.

We are pleased to announce that the Land Trust and our project partners have secured over $3 million to support our Marine Conservation Initiative – a strategic approach to protecting high-value coastal habitats within the South Sound/Nisqually Reach ma-rine environment.

Federal, state and county agencies have awarded these funds to protect some of the area’s best-remaining coastal habitat – 1.5 miles of estuarine and marine shoreline surrounded by 175 acres of mature forests and freshwater wetlands.

We are still negotiating these transactions, but this is urgent work, as an informal survey of the South Puget Sound waterfront property market makes compellingly clear.

It’s telling that there are so few undeveloped waterfront properties still for sale in the region. Over 75 percent of Puget Sound’s estuary and nearshore habitat has already been developed or converted to non-natural uses.

The loss of this vital habitat is pushing salmon, orca and many other keystone species to the brink of extinction. The region’s commercial fish, shellfish, recreation, tourism and real-estate economies also depend upon a healthy Puget Sound.

A highlight of this work is the Sound View Camp, project, on Drayton Passage near Anderson Island. The site has mature forest and freshwater wetlands adjacent to a spectacular nearshore complex that includes a large barrier embayment and barrier beach and lagoon, feeder bluff, saltmarsh, tideland and other habitats.

Sound View Camp also hosts hundreds of youth and adult visitors every year. Our unique partnership will support the Camp’s extensive environmental education and outdoor recreation programs and increase understanding of the importance of marine habitats and conservation.

Sound View Camp shoreline: This project will protect rich orca and salmon habitat while supporting the Camp’s environmental education and outdoor recreation programs.

Circling back to the survey of waterfront properties mentioned earlier, an even more compelling case emerges for the value contributed through our Marine Initiative: The average cost of the ten or so waterfront properties currently for sale in the region is $1,798 per “waterfront foot.” Viewed through this lens, within the coming year the Initiative would protect approximately $14 million in waterfront value.

However, it’s impossible to place a monetary value on the benefits this unique habitat provides for orcas, salmon and the region’s human inhabitants.

Essential support for our current Marine Conservation Initiative projects has been provided by the Washington Departments of Ecology, Fish and Wildlife, and Natural Resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, Pierce County Conservation Futures, Th Thurston County Conservation Futures, Ducks Unlimited and the Nisqually Delta Association.

By Pete Grebowski, Land Steward

Pacific sideband snails shoot “love darts” during a courship that is elaborate…but slow.

Hardly studied and often overlooked, the Pacific sideband snail (Monadenia fidelis) is one of the most interesting species you’ve never thought much about. From their anatomy to the extreme pressures they face from warming climates and human development, these little gastropods are far more complex than you’d expect.

Last month we had a planting party at a Land Trust property along the Mashel River. Throughout the day we saw eagles, deer, salamanders, and signs of beaver and elk. While these creatures quickly dispersed upon our arrival, one remained – a Pacific sideband snail slowly making its way across a leaf near our snack station.

It made me think that while most species have a relatively agile response to human influence or natural events like fire or falling trees, some, like this snail, are basically trapped in their surrounding environment.

Pacific sidebands are endemic to the Pacific Coast of North America, where they typically reside in cool, moist, shaded forests. They feed on fungi and plant material and provide prey for raccoons, shrews, and mice, among others.

But with rising temperatures, intensifying wildfires, continuous human development, and decreasing rainfall, their suitable habitat is becoming increasingly marginalized. Other, more mobile species can shift home ranges in response to these pressures, but terrestrial snails don’t move anywhere fast. And their mobility is being further impeded as the traditionally moist substrates they travel on dry up.

They might move slowly, but Pacific sidebands (like many terrestrial snails) give a different meaning to the phrase “darting across the ladscape.” They are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive organs.

As if that anatomy isn’t complex enough, they shoot what are called “love darts” during an elaborate courtship process, virtually playing cupid with each other before they mate! (Although separate from the copulation process, these love darts are thought to enhance reproductive success after mating.)

While we typically focus our interests on large mammals, birds of prey, and salmon, it is important to remember that nature exists at all levels, and that seemingly unexciting species may have a much more interesting and ecologically important life cycle than we’d expect.

Next time you come across a Pacific sideband, just think: You are looking at nature’s version of the Roman god of love!

Nisqually River view from our new Middle Reach Property.

Nisqually Middle Reach: Three years, Five Salmon Species, 30,000 Native Plants

This winter it’s all hands on deck – or in the dirt!– as a team of Nisqually Watershed partners, volunteers, and students launch an ambitious three-year project to plant 30,000 native plants and restore 60 acres of high-priority salmon habitat and floodplain along one of the most dynamic reaches of the Nisqually River.

Kids, students, volunteers, and project partners will help plant native trees and shrubs on our new property.

The Land Trust acquired the site last May. It has long been the critical missing piece in our 520-acre Powell Creek Protected Area, on the Thurston County side of the river, about 12 miles above McKenna.

“I’ve been looking at that gap for almost thirty years,” said Land Trust founder George Walter. The Land Trust purchased the remote property from the Spooner family, which had used it to grow berry cane rootstock but stopped farming it several years ago, in the face of increasing transportation difficulties and other challenges.

“The Spooners were able to make productive use of this land for awhile,” Walter said. “And now productivity is being shifted back to growing salmon.”

The property is located along what is known as the Middle Reach of the Nisqually River. It is one of the river’s most productive zones for all five salmon species native to the Nisqually Watershed, including Chinook salmon and steelhead trout. Both are listed as threatend under the Endangered Speacies Act and use the Middle Reach for spawning and rearing.

The Spooner property was the critical missing piece in our Powell Creek Protected Area.

Native plants were largely removed from the site during its tenure as a commercial agricultural property. Using techniques refined over a decade of habitat restoration on adjoining properties in the Powell Creek unit, the Land Trust and its longtime partners – the Nisqually Indian Tribe, the Nisqually River Education Project, and hundreds of student and adult volunteers – will remove invasive species such as Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberry and install native trees and shrubs.

This site is sandy, and reestablishing native forest will require planting species that can tolerate short periods of high groundwater during high river flow but are also adapted to droughty conditions that will occur during summer. The planting will likely include shore pine, snowberry, Oregon grape, ocean spray, bitter cherry, western white pine, Douglas fir, and western-Ponderosa pine.

Over time, the Nisqually team will restore the site to naturally functioning forest, which will provide shade, shelter, nutrients, and habitat complexity. “This is a big deal for the long-term,” said George Walter. “I may not see it happen, but eventually this reach of the river will return to its natural ways. The salmon are smiling!”

The Nisqually River’s Middle Reach is 6.5 miles long, running from the Ohop Creek confluence downstream to Tanwax Creek. Almost 90 percent of the Middle Reach, on both sides of the river, is now in permanent conservation status.

With “Puget Sound Orca Recovery Day” fast approaching, the Land Trust is pleased to announce three major projects designed to protect nearly two miles of Puget Sound and estuary shoreline.

Protection of these sites will benefit many species listed by state and federal resource agencies as endangered, threatened or at risk, including orca, Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead trout, and the Olympia oyster.

The projects are the first launched under the Land Trust’s new Marine Conservation Initiative, a strategic approach to protecting high-value coastal habitats within the Nisqually Reach-South Sound marine environment.

The Anderson Island project will protect 72 acres along South Oro Bay.

One project, funded by Pierce County Conservation Futures and scheduled for completion by year’s end, will protect 72 acres and over one-half mile of shoreline on Anderson Island, within the Nisqually Reach Aquatic Reserve. The project includes a $175,000 landowner donation to match a $550,000 Pierce Conservation Futures grant.

The two other projects will protect an entire 90-acre estuary and forest complex along the eastern shore of the Johnson Point peninsula and a 93-acre environmental-education camp and retreat center on the Key Peninsula that contains nine different types of coastal shoreline habitat.

“This project provides a unique opportunity to protect vital habitat and support environmental education and recreation programs that will benefit thousands of children and other community members every year,” said Eric Erler, Marine Conservation Initiative project manager for the Land Trust.

The Key Penninsula project will protect nine types of coastal habitat.

The Johnson Point and Key Peninsula projects have a combined cost of some $3.5 million. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will request state legislature approval of $853,000 in Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program funding for the projects in the 2019-2021 state budget. The projects also seek nearly $2 million through the National Coastal Wetlands Conservation Grant Program.

Project partners include private landowners, the Washington Department of Ecology, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nisqually Indian Tribe, the Nisqually Delta Association, Ducks Unlimited, and the Washington Department of Natural Resources.

“Southern Puget Sound estuaries form one of the most productive living ecosystems on Earth,” Erler said. “The Marine Conservation Initiative builds on the great work in the freshwater environment already achieved by Nisqually  Land Trust and its many partners.”

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