Disappearing Bogs -- Ancient, Harsh Wetlands Grow Rare Amid Pressures Of Urban Development

------------------------------------------------------------------ Ecology. Often victims of creeping development, bogs are highly acidic and sometimes ancient ecosystems. King County is considering standards that would preserve these unique wetlands. ------------------------------------------------------------------

SAMMAMISH PLATEAU - Queens Bog has been laying down carpets of sphagnum peat for 11,000 years. The teardrop-shaped wetland looks much as it did in the time of Moses, but no one knows if it will survive 10 or 20 more years.

That's an alarming thought to Sarah Spear Cooke and other wetland scientists, who have come to understand that bogs are as irreplaceable as they are rare.

On a recent visit to Queens Bog, Cooke stood among the hummocks of deep-green sphagnum moss as she reached out to a stem of grasslike sedge.

"This is the wrong species," she said with disdain, "which is a bad indicator. . . . I wish it wasn't here. This shows me it isn't as acid as it used to be."

There aren't many natural places where a botanist would want water to be acidic. Then again, there aren't many places like a sphagnum bog. And in Puget Sound country, there aren't that many bogs.

Urbanization has destroyed most of the bogs in its path, and until recently few people gave much thought to their continuing loss in the suburbs.

That could soon change. King County Executive Gary Locke has submitted to the King County Council a surface-water design manual that would, for the first time here, adopt a strict set of standards aimed specifically at protecting bogs.

Cooke, who specializes in wetland plants and soils, was upset over the alien sedge in Queens Bog because it was another indication of how much the wetland has deteriorated as a result of human influences during the nine years she has been studying it.

Unless people stop pouring untreated water into it and do something to reverse the mess left by a natural-gas pipeline, this wetland east of Lake Sammamish may go the way of dozens of other bogs in King County.

Federal wetland regulations generally don't protect bogs because they are isolated from other waterways and are above the headwaters of streams.

Bleak environment

What is so special about a bog, anyway?

Just about everything.

A bog typically forms when sphagnum moss takes root in a depression generally fed only by rainwater.

Two things happen in the stagnant water to create unique growing conditions. One is the dearth of such common nutrients and minerals as potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus. The other is the chemical change that takes place when sphagnum moss takes up the positively charged ions from the few minerals that fall with the rain or seep in underground.

The sphagnum releases negatively charged hydrogen, and the water turns acidic.

Devoid of oxygen and fertilizer, more acidic than a tomato, bog water is a bleak environment for most plants and animals. Amphibian eggs, for instance, can't survive in the acidity.

The lack of oxygen creates ideal conditions for producing peat, deposits of dead sphagnum laid down over the centuries. Peat has produced some remarkable scientific finds. In the 1980s, British scientists studied the 1,500-year-old remains of a man who had been hanged and his throat slashed in what may have been a Druidic sacrifice before he was buried in a bog in Cheshire, England. The bodies of even older "bog people" have been found in Denmark and other European countries. Perhaps the oldest living organisms ever discovered were the bacteria living in the gut of an 11,000-year-old mastodon uncovered in a peat bog at a Newark, Ohio, golf course six years ago.

"They're museum pieces showing everything that's happened for 10,000 years," says Fred Weinmann, an Environmental Protection Agency wetland specialist. "There's no way you can put something like that back in the landscape again in less than 10,000 years."

Only plants adapted to a harsh peat environment can survive in a bog. Without minerals, the few trees that manage to take root are invariably stunted. A 4 1/2-foot-high Queens Bog hemlock cored by Cooke was an impressive 80 years old.

Better adapted to bog life are white-tufted cotton grass, flowering bog laurel, Labrador tea and wild cranberry. Perhaps most intriguing is the dime-sized sundew, a carnivorous plant that captures tiny insects and sucks out their nutrients. The sphagnum hummocks that grow around laurel and tea shrubs resemble miniature versions of the steep mountainsides that have so entranced generations of Chinese and Japanese painters.

At Queens Bog in the fall, birds have been seen feeding drunkenly on fermented cranberries. Mammals are not prolific, but the southern red-backed vole's best habitat is bogs. Three kinds of beetles unique to local bogs are candidates for the threatened or endangered-species list.

Rod Crawford, curator of arachnids at the Burke Museum, calls sphagnum bogs "the best of all known places to find lots and lots of interesting spiders." On a visit to a local bog last year, he identified four previously unknown species. His visits usually yield at least one discovery.

`Magical places'

The light, springy peat floats in the water. In Queens Bog, the peat mat is 25 feet deep. When two people step onto a hummock, it rocks like a boat in water.

"They're just special, magical places. They're remnants from geological time," marvels Louise Kulzer, a King County lake scientist.

They are also disappearing at a rapid clip.

Long prized by gardeners as a soil supplement that loosens dirt and holds water, sphagnum peat continues to be mined in Canada and Northern European countries where bogs are extensive. In East King County, peat once was mined at Laughing Jacobs Lake and Moss Lake. The latter was acquired by King County three years ago.

Locally, the biggest threat to bogs is their use as a dumping place for the water that runs off roads, roofs and lawns. North Seattle's Ronald Bog, once known for its sphagnum carpet and its cranberries, has evolved into a mere lake. In the Pacific Estates development east of Lake Sammamish, lawns were built on the very edge of a bog, two large culverts installed, and fill dirt trucked in to build a road to a gazebo in the middle of the wetland.

A similar fate may await Queens Bog, which is adjacent to the massive Klahanie development.

Queens Bog, separated from Klahanie by a steep slope, has received multiple insults. First it was split by a pipeline. Then the bog became a detention pond for runoff. As in the Pacific Estates bogs, alien plants are spreading into the sphagnum mat and stormwater is diluting the acid environment.

King County scientists have mapped 42 bogs in unincorporated areas, about half on the Sammamish and Soos Creek plateaus. They represent 3 percent of all wetlands.

County officials have spent four years working with developers on stormwater regulations that would protect still-pristine bogs without being overly restrictive. The proposed rules would give developers choices about how to meet the treatment goal, but none of the options is cheap or easy.

Most of runoff must be diverted away from bogs, and the remainder must meet tough, new limits for phosphorus, nitrates and alkalinity. These standards are the best that engineering can offer in the 1990s, but King County officials admit they don't know if they're adequate to save bogs adjacent to new subdivisions.

Although the rules haven't been adopted by the County Council, Pacific Properties will follow them as a condition of development in the 491-home Trossachs development adjacent to a bog near Beaver Lake on the Sammamish Plateau. Any water running into the bog will first go through a "treatment train" with a holding pond, a planted swale and a filter of sand and peat.

Pacific Properties President Mike Miller is unhappy about the cost of building stormwater ponds to protect other wetlands in the subdivision. But when it comes to the bog, he isn't complaining.

"I've been doing this for 23 years," Miller says, "and I've only developed around two wetlands that were really impressive, where you want to take your kids out and show them what a real wetland looks like. That, in my mind, deserves extra protection."

---------- Acidic bog ----------

The lower the pH level, the more acidic. The higher the pH, the more alkaline. 7.0 is neutral.

Lemon 2.0 . Vinegar 2.2 . Sphagnum bog 4.1 # . Tomato 4.2 . Small lake 6.9 . Distilled water 7.0 . Baking soda 8.2 . Lake Washington 8.3 . Laundry detergent 10.0 .

# Measured at Beaver Lake .

Sources: "Wetlands," William J. Mitsch and James G. Gosselink; Encyclopedia Americana; James C. Bergdahl; "Plants and Animals of the Pacific Northwest," Eugene N. Kozloff; World Book; King County Surface Water Management Division for waterways, "Acid Rain: A Sourcebook for Young People," Christina G. Miller and Louise A. Berry; reporting by Keith Ervin.

Chris Soprych / Seattle Times