Padilla Bay: There's plenty of nature to see — and smell

BAY VIEW, Skagit County — With borrowed binoculars on a sunny autumn day, our careful scan for great blue herons wading in Padilla Bay yields an impressive count.

Twenty, 21, 22 — and yes, that's not just a stick in the mud, that's the 23rd heron — all in one peering through the glasses.

For this show, the box seat is the observation deck a short walk from the Breazeale Interpretive Center. For fall migrations this is a shorebird watcher's high season.

Visitors reach the deck through a pedestrian tunnel beneath the road, emerging at treetop height in a stilt-legged tower that straddles the beach bluff. You literally get a bird's-eye view of feathered visitors below.

From the platform, all you hear is breeze whispering in the alders, broken occasionally by a gull's squawking and the distant honking of geese.

This is Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, a mouthful of name for a very shallow bay — you can practically wade across it, even at high tide — just east of Anacortes. Here, the king crop is eelgrass.

Padilla (reserve employees say "Puh-DEE-ya") grows 7,500 acres of the ribbonlike seaweed, according to interpretive panels you can scan while waiting for more birds to land. The stuff is a haven for tiny salmon, as well as crabs, snails, sea slugs and anemones.

It's also brant chow.

Some 2,000 black brants, a type of coastal sea goose, started arriving here this week after a phenomenal nonstop, 72-hour flight — an annual ritual — from summer feeding grounds at Izembek Lagoon, Alaska.

While other brants use Padilla Bay like a truck stop and continue southward to Mexico, this group — actually a subspecies — stays the winter to fatten up on its favorite food: eelgrass.

Every year about this time, the birds wait for a storm to blow up a tailwind, then ride the wild breeze south.

"They lose a third of their body weight in the flight here, without a stop," said Glen Alexander, education coordinator for the reserve. "It's pretty amazing."

'Estuary Soup'

There are other birds, too, drawn by the rural fields and woods surrounding the interpretive center, which sits above the bay on a gentle slope donated in the 1970s by a former Seattle school teacher, Edna Breazeale, who grew up on the site. Her family home and a barn are preserved as part of the reserve, established in 1980.

"Last winter we counted 350 bald eagles out here," Alexander told a group of visiting fifth graders from Everett recently as he swept his arm toward the orchard and wild meadows surrounding the world-class interpretive center.

For visiting students, Alexander dresses up as a chef with a bad French accent and gives a lesson on "Estuary Soup," the rich organic brew of water, phytoplankton and zooplankton — microscopic plants and animals — and detritus, the scientific label for all the silt, sticks, dead leaves and grass that wash downstream into the bay.

The mix of muck, when decaying healthily, is what you smell when you stand on a beach and breathe deeply the "salt air," Alexander tells the kids as they head to the beach to look for marine life. "It's not salt, it's dead stuff!"

When the recipe goes right, algae and eelgrass grow. On this fall day, high mounds of emerald-colored eelgrass washed up at the water's edge testify to the bay's fertility.

Islands and oil refineries

Before making a pilgrimage in search of virgin nature, however, consider the oil refineries.

Look northwest from Padilla Bay and you see herons and the eye-pleasing profiles of Hat, Guemes, Cypress and other islands of the San Juans. Look straight west three miles and you see the industrial tanks and pipes of the Equilon and Tesoro oil refineries on March Point.

While the industrial presence makes for an interesting challenge of coexistence for the preserve, the view is easy to ignore in favor of nature's abundance.

From the interpretive center, borrow a trail guide and take a nature walk on the .8-mile Upland Trail, an easy loop that is paved and wide for the first 1,575 feet through open grassland edged by bountiful bushes of snowberry.

Beyond the pavement comes a stroll beneath maple and cedar to a clearing with a stunning view of Mount Baker rising above a neighboring pasture of shaggy Scottish Highland cattle. Our walk included hawks overhead and coyote droppings underfoot.

For the best shoreside hike, drive three miles south of the interpretive center to the well-marked Padilla Bay Shore Trail, which follows the top of a dike for 2.25 miles. The wheelchair-navigable trail offers wide vistas of the islands and bay.

While the outdoor opportunities are numerous, don't neglect the interpretive center. It includes kid-pleasing exhibits such as a topographical map of Western Washington that comes with 3-D glasses, and a wall of cupboards, push-buttons and drawers that visitors may open to "explore" a mural of the bay.

It makes you think about nature in a new way, so that next time you're on a beach, maybe you'll stop and smell the dead stuff.

Ahh — beat your chest and breathe deep.

IF YOU GO

Getting there: To reach the Breazeale Interpretive Center, allow about 90 minutes driving from Seattle. From Interstate 5 at Burlington, Skagit County, take Exit 230 to Highway 20. Go west five miles on Highway 20 and turn right on Farm to Market Road. Drive north three miles and turn left on Josh Wilson Road. Drive about 1.5 miles and turn right on Bayview-Edison Road. Continue less than a mile to the interpretive center, on the right. The center is wheelchair-accessible.

Hours: Open Wednesday-Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (closed Nov. 22 and 23). Free admission.

Walks and viewpoints:

• The wheelchair-accessible Observation Deck and Upland Trail are reached from the interpretive center.

• To reach the Shore Trail from the interpretive center, drive 1.1 miles south on Bayview-Edison Road and turn left on Second Street (signed for Shore Trail parking). Drive uphill about half a block to a marked parking area; walk back down to Bayview-Edison Road, turn left and walk a short distance to the well-marked trailhead across the road.

For wheelchair access, borrow a gate key at the interpretive center. A handicapped parking space is at the south end of the trail, a drive of about two additional miles beyond the north trailhead; watch for it on the right, by a wheelchair-accessible portable toilet.

What to bring: Warm, waterproof clothing, a bird guide and binoculars. A few guides and binoculars are available for checkout at the interpretive center.

Upcoming:

Two educational programs for children:

• Crabs are the topic Nov. 14 and 15 at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.; keyed to preschoolers.

• Kids 6 to 9 can join Hawk Watch to observe migrating raptors Nov. 16 and 17 from 10:30 a.m to noon.

To register, or for more information: 360-428-1558 or inlet.geol.sc.edu/PDB/index.html.

Brian Cantwell can be reached at 206-748-5724 or bcantwell@seattletimes.com.