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Brown
Conservation Easement:
48 Acres along the shoreline of
Henderson Inlet.
Conserved in 2001.
This property has three wetland systems, several streams, and
critical estuarine environments. There is also a mature
evergreen forest situated adjacent to marine shoreline
and estuarine environments, upland deciduous and
evergreen forest communities, and a cedar wetland forest
community.
The Brown property provides habitat for great blue
heron, bald eagle, deer, coyote, osprey, pileated
woodpecker, shellfish, and a variety of salmonoids
(chum, coho, steelhead, cutthroat).
Notes from the Field:
Brown Easement
by Shelley Kirk Rudeen
(Issue 36 Winter 2002) If you approach the Brown
property like a deer, you’ll wander through green light falling
among maple trees. Picking your way along ragged wetland edges of
the little creek, you’ll browse on tender salmonberry now in bud.
If
you fly in like a bald eagle, you’ll carry clouds on your shoulders
and pause to hunt from a perch in the canopy of old fir and hemlock.
If
you arrive like the rain, you’ll sweep across Henderson Inlet, searching
out long fingers of the small estuary. You’ll collect in heavy drops
hanging from cantilevered madrone trees, and fall to saltwater in
a subtle chorus of hollow tones, like bamboo chimes.
If
you get here like I did, you’ll wear boots and brush pants, with
rite-in-the-rain paper in one hand and binoculars in the other.
Then you’ll have to decide what to look at first. Just 32 acres,
the Brown property is a remarkably diverse addition to the Trust’s
portfolio of conservation easements. The property boasts a deeply
incised saltwater shoreline, mature forest, younger alder stands,
and two wetland riparian stream corridors.
This
sort of diversity is heaven for birds. Wintering waterfowl float
in the two arms of the estuary at high tide, and shorebirds patter
in the mud at low. Raptors make good use of shoreline trees, as
well as snags interspersed in the forest, for their hunting perches.
Snags are numerous. They come in all sizes and stages of decay –
an open invitation to woodpeckers.
Even
in winter, woodland birds are present. A brown creeper explores
every nook and cranny of the bark on a fir tree. Nearby, a ruby-crowned
kinglet – solitary as usual – forages in the understory while its
cousins, a flock of gregarious golden-crowned kinglets, chatter
in the branches. Come spring, the varied forest structure will play
host to more species of woodland songbirds. Many will arrive from
Central and South America. While our southern neighbors work to
preserve the wintering grounds of these birds by cultivating shade-grown
coffee and preserving tropical rainforests, the Trust helps us northern
types do our part by preserving woodland and wetland breeding areas.
According
to the habitat inventory prepared for the Brown property, the saltwater
shoreline is the most valuable wildlife habitat there. In addition
to supporting numerous waterbirds, the unvegetated intertidal zone
is home to untold numbers of marine invertebrates that burrow in
the mud or drift in the water column with the murky tide. Woodland
Creek’s fragile salmon runs migrate along the wild shoreline – juveniles
making the dash for open ocean and adults returning to spawn.
But
it is the streams that interest me the most: the way they meander
through deep, fern-covered ravines; the saturated soils of wetlands
flanking the little watercourses; the spill of stream to bay creating
little estuaries.
What
if you could come here as the skunk cabbage? Pushing upward from
winter-wet muck, unfurling your yellow cowl, you’d release the pungent
perfume that signals, Spring’s
here! And all’s well, for this habitat has been protected!
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