A Rock and a hard place

Welcome to Protection Island, a strange and inhospitable rock.

Cliffs are sheared off by screaming wind and roiling water; land is half-forest, half-dunes in the shadow of the Olympic Peninsula's rain-wringing mountains. Birds travel underwater here. Deer swim. Cactuses grow because there is no water, here in the middle of the sea.

It is an idyllic world, starkly beautiful, but off limits to the public. One way to see Protection Island, a national wildlife refuge, up close (that is, at a minimum of 200 yards away) is on the spring birding cruises offered by the Port Townsend Marine Science Center. The island is home to 75 percent of all the seabirds that nest in Washington's inland waters.

During a recent tour of Protection Island, which lies north of Discovery Bay, near Port Townsend, a harbor porpoise surfaced beside the boat and revealed its dorsal fin before submerging again. Minutes later, about 15 seals surrounded the boat, heads bobbing in the water.

Bumping along the kelp beds on the way to the island, the boat cruised by Point Wilson - the point beyond the beaches of Fort Worden State Park, where Puget Sound meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Groups of bird-watching tourists take this same route every spring, leaving from the Marine Science Center and circling Protection Island, a crowd of binoculars trained on the thousands of birds and other wildlife that inhabit the island.

This is a place of history and diverse biological habitat, where tidal action and currents create constant upwellings, stirring up organic matter and making the water rich with nutrients and life.

Protection for the island

The decades brought few strangers to this harsh and isolated stump of glacial deposits. Captain George Vancouver first landed here in 1792. Some Tennessee militiamen took the island as their bounty in the years after 1812. Failed potato farmers came in 1876, left a decade later. In 1914 the island was almost made into a leper colony. The Navy took over the island in 1943, and Protection Island became protection from the Axis.

In 1965 investors eyed the rugged and lonely place, sitting in the shadow of the beautiful Olympic Mountains, and dreamed of vacation and retirement lots. The bulldozers came, caving in the nests of rare birds. Development was later halted after conservationists campaigned to protect the island's wildlife.

Today Protection Island is populated mostly by birds, along with occasional human visitors to a few remaining private homes; over time their land, too, will revert to the wild things.

Most of the island is undeveloped. The air is clean and quiet. You can see to the bottom of the clear, dark water. A dozen harbor seals roll around on Kanim Point, the long spit that extends westward from the island.

The reasons this island exists now as a protected place, the only national wildlife refuge established during the Reagan Administration, are twofold: The lack of a water supply kept people away for a time, and a woman named Eleanor Stopps did the rest. Stopps, a resident of nearby Mats Mats Bay, had long watched and studied the island's bird colonies.

After the island was opened for development in the '60s, Stopps, now 80, raised the money to buy 23 lots there. She wrote letters and lobbied to protect the island from development, eventually testifying before Congress.

In 1982, Protection Island was given back to the birds. And so it remains, quiet, wind-sculpted, and full-time home to the birds and one caretaker, much the same as when Vancouver first came by, waxing poetic.

In his journals, he wrote, "On landing on the west end of the supposed island, and ascending its eminence which was nearly a perpendicular cliff, our attention was immediately called to a landscape, almost as enchantingly beautiful as the most elegantly furnished pleasure grounds in Europe . . . "

A diverse habitat

Protection Island is home to a wide spectrum of wildlife because its land is so diverse.

Half of the island sits in the "rain shadow," the area around Sequim that gets an average of just more than a foot of rain each year. The Olympic Mountains catch the weather systems coming from the sea; the clouds are wrung out over the mountaintops, leaving little precipitation. Sand dunes and desert-suited plant and animal life cover that half of the island. The other half is regularly beaten with wind and rain, covered in green grasses and trees.

The island is one of the few major colonies in the world for the Rhinoceros auklet, a bird so named for the horn on its beak. Digging with its sharp little feet to build burrows eight to nine feet deep, the bird nests in the steep slopes and slanting cliffs. Stopps said auklets fly underwater to herd schools of herring and other small fish. When you see a large flock of birds in one clump over the sea's surface, Stopps said, they are likely in a feeding frenzy over the auklets' roundup.

Seen from the recent boat tour: two bald eagles perched on snags on top of the cliffs. Black brants, small native geese, make stops at the island to eat epiphytes off the eel grass, lingering in the estuary until they've built up their body weight for migration. Double-crested cormorants create conical homes, architectural marvels, on top of the island's cliffs. Protection Island is also the only home to tufted puffins in the state's inland waters. Deer make the occasional trip from civilization to Protection Island; they swim over from Diamond Point.

Protection Island is also geologically important. A mammoth tooth was found during a beach cleanup a few years ago. For this reason scientists believe the island was once attached to the mainland. Stopps remembers seeing ancient bones - human and animal - scattered on the porches of the few houses that once perched on the island's cliffs; residents had combed the bones from the beach.

Stopps now gets a special tour of the island once a year.

"Whenever I see it I'm reminded all over again of what a special place this is," Stopps said.

Caitlin Cleary's phone message number is 206-464-8214. Her e-mail address is: ccleary@seattletimes.com.

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If You Go

The Port Townsend Marine Science Center, a nonprofit educational organization, has scheduled its sixth year of spring Protection Island boat tours. An on-board naturalist provides commentary on the island's biology, geology and history as well as bird identification, behavior and ecology.

Trips are scheduled from 1 to 4 p.m. this Saturday and April 1, 8, 16, 23 and 29. They are timed to coincide with spring bird migrations.

Ticket prices are $40 per person or $35 for members of the marine science center, Audubon Society and Washington Ornithological Society. Special rates can be arranged for children and groups. Hot cider is available on board, but bringing a sack lunch is a good idea. For reservations contact the marine science center at 360-385-5582 or e-mail ptmsc@olympus.net.