New rest stop for migration route

When ducks and geese fly north next spring, they’ll have 238 more acres of nesting and resting spots near Spokane.

Just weeks ago, the land was dry and used for growing hay. Now, it is crawling with heavy machinery. Wetlands and a series of four ponds are being restored to the property, which was purchased recently with a federal grant obtained by Ducks Unlimited.

With any luck, a normal Northwest winter will return and the ponds will be filled with snowmelt by spring, said Brian Heck, a Ducks Unlimited engineer who designed the project. “It’s just a matter of putting water on it,” he said.

The wetlands and pothole lakes in this part of Eastern Washington were carved out of the region’s channeled scablands by ice age glaciers and escaping floodwaters from glacial Lake Missoula. For thousands of years, the wetlands served as critical stopovers for migrating waterfowl, said Gary Blevins, president of the Spokane Audubon Society. But in the last 100 years, many wet areas had been filled in by farm fields and housing developments.

Five years of drought have made life even tougher for birds, Blevins said. Although some waterfowl species spend their breeding season in the Cheney area, many continue north to Alaska, northern British Columbia or the Northwest Territories. A place to rest and eat along the way is critical for the birds “to end up at the breeding grounds in condition to mate,” Blevins said.

Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge is only about a mile from the restoration work, but each additional acre of reclaimed wetlands will help boost bird numbers, Blevins said. “This will be very important.”

The land was purchased two years ago for $341,000 using a federal North American Wetlands Conservation Act grant. The Inland Northwest Land Trust owns and manages the land, but the nonprofit group plans to donate the tract soon to either the wildlife refuge or city of Cheney, said Chris DeForest, executive director of the land trust. No hunting will be allowed on the site and public access will be limited, at least until it is turned over to a new owner, he said.

DeForest said the land trust has been focused on projects that protect or restore wildlife migration corridors, including the pathway elk once walked between Mount Spokane and the Spokane River and bull trout spawning runs along Lake Pend Oreille. The former wetlands near Cheney rank among the most important and most imperiled of those areas, DeForest said.

Although the wetlands had been filled in, engineers identified the best places for restoration simply by focusing on portions of the hayfield that stayed greenest during the driest parts of the year. On Monday, excavation began. By the end of the week, about 16,000 cubic yards – a dump truck carries about 10 yards – of black earth and volcanic ash will be removed and dumped on higher portions of the land, said Joe Partney, owner of Partney Construction, the general contractor. The business, based in LaGrande, Ore., has worked with Ducks Unlimited on 63 restoration projects.

Up to 4 feet of volcanic ash is buried below the topsoil in the area, Partney said. The ash was deposited when Mount Mazama erupted about 7,700 years ago, creating present day Crater Lake, Ore. The substance forms a good liner for the wetland ponds.

Partney said restoring what nature created requires a different mindset on the part of the equipment operators.

“There’s an art to this,” he said Tuesday, taking a break from maneuvering a giant bulldozer. “Normally, we try to be as precise as possible. Here, we’re trying to make everything uneven, trying to make it look like a bomb went off, no straight lines, lots of curves. … We’re putting it back to what it should be.”

Later this month, the hills of moved earth will be replanted with native species, but the ponds will green up on their own as migrating ducks arrive, carrying seeds and plant fragments in their feathers.