Conservation-by Tim Manns

Flood plains flood - - and always will

At this mid-December writing, for the second time in a week Skagit County is under a flood watch even as water from record Skagit River levels a few days ago has not fully left flooded fields and neighborhoods. While flooding in the flood plain should never come as a surprise, water damage would be worse if there were not at least some undeveloped areas accessible to rising waters. A case in point is the Barney Lake area, where Skagit Land Trust’s conservation area protects almost 400 acres at the eastern edge of Mount Vernon, much of it wetland hosting wintering Trumpeter Swans and many other waterfowl. During floods, Barney Lake hugely expands. This natural area receives Skagit River floodwaters backing up Nookachamps Creek and reducing the river’s volume by spreading water over a large area. The past week’s high water hosted many thousands of Mallards, Northern Pintails, and American Wigeon on this enlarged lake. Skagit’s extensive and expensive system of dikes is imperfect. Despite increasing risks to floodplain development from climate related changes, regulations in Skagit County and its towns and cities still permit new development in areas known to flood. Witness Mount Vernon’s recently permitting construction of a large church and likely soon, an apartment building in a repeatedly flooded area next to Barney Lake Conservation Area.

Climate Impacts Advisory Committee

On a positive note, the Skagit County Commissioners responded to many requests and on December 15th established a Climate Impacts Advisory Committee. See Skagit Audubon Conservation Reports for background information: (https://www.skagitaudubon.org/conservation-notes-letters) 

Surprising given how vulnerable it is, Skagit County lags far behind other counties in addressing climate change. The advisory committee’s charter and composition are not exactly what conservation groups had hoped, but, depending on implementation, this committee may prove a step in the right direction.

2026 Legislative Session - Environmental Priorities Coalition Goals

The Washington State Legislature opens its 2026 legislative session on January 12th. This will be a short, 60-day session as the state’s two-year budget was passed last year during the alternate- year long session. Even though this is not a budget-writing year, with Washington’s revenue shortfall, there will be difficult budget discussions and a need for conservation advocates to safeguard important projects and programs.

As each year, Audubon Washington has joined more than 25 other conservation organizations in the Environmental Priorities Coalition (EPC) focusing on a few goals during the session:

• Protect Climate and Environmental Health Funding

The need to balance the state’s budget puts climate-related and other environmental programs at risk of further cuts or the diversion of dedicated funding sources to other than their intended purposes. For example, revenues from the Climate Commitment Act must go to measures addressing climate change and its impacts.

• Restore Wildfire Resilience Funding

In 2021, the Legislature passed House Bill 1168 committing $125 million each biennium to implement fire resilience measures, but the two-year budget passed in 2024 cut this funding in half. This reduced level of effort puts communities and natural landscapes at greater risk. 

• Address the Impacts of Data Centers on the Environment and Affordability

Proliferating data centers in Washington could blow up our state’s ambitious climate and clean energy goals while also making energy less affordable and reliable. The Legislature needs to pass, in the EPC’s words, “data center-focused policies that will protect and further our state’s climate and clean energy laws and goals; protect ratepayers from financial and reliability impacts; minimize impacts to communities and natural resources including air, water, and salmon; and maximize benefits to communities.”   

• Pass the Bottles and Cans Recycling Refund Act

Drink containers are a large part of our state’s waste and litter. In Washington, only 30% of beverage containers are currently recycled. The Recycling Refund Act would place a refundable 10-cent deposit on most beverage containers to incentivize recycling.

 For more detail about these priorities, go to Environmental Priorities Coalition - Washington Conservation Action.  As bills related to these priorities are introduced, you can track their progress by signing up at “Subscribe to updates” at the top of the EPC page and by scrolling on that page to “Bills to Watch” and clicking on “Sign up for Hot Lists.” Once bill numbers are assigned, you can read the bill text and reports and see where each stands in the legislative process using the legislature’s website: Bills, meetings, and session.

Audubon’s statewide network of 25 chapters and 45,000 members gives it a voice in every legislative district. Let’s use each of our individual and chapter voices to advance the cause of protecting birds and other wildlife and the habitat they need. Sign up for Audubon Washington action alerts at Join Our Action Network | Audubon Washington.

Skagit County Flood Map 12/18/25

Conservation-by Tim Manns

Lights Out Washington

At the Washington State Audubon Conservation Committee’s October meeting the chapters unanimously supported Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society’s submitted resolution titled “Lights Out Washington.” The resolution encourages Washington’s Audubon Chapters to participate in National Audubon’s Lights Out Program (Lights Out Program | Audubon). This involves urging individuals, businesses, cities, and counties to redesign and reduce nighttime lighting to limit interference with bird migration. Many birds migrate after dark, and lighting can disorient them, inducing collisions with buildings and other illuminated structures such as radio towers. The resolution also includes a determination to work to reduce bird collisions with windows whether or not the injured birds are migrating.

Birders share an awareness of and real astonishment at bird migration. That a Rufous Hummingbird 4 inches long weighing 0.12 ounces twice annually flies from Mexico to southeast Alaska staggers the imagination, and yet it is just one of many bird species accomplishing such a feat every year. We can make migration easier for these winged wonders by undoing things we have done that make their journey more perilous. At a time when I hope we are all looking for positive things we can do to conserve bird species, here are some things: redesign and reduce artificial lighting interfering with bird migration, and related, reduce opportunities for birds to collide with our windows.

There are actions to take at home right away without a county-wide Lights Out effort. For a short list of lighting considerations for your home, go to Lights Out! — Pilchuck Audubon Society where our friends at the Audubon chapter in Snohomish County have posted good ideas. To follow up on the October resolution we also need to take a bigger look at our community. At this point we don’t know to what degree light at night might be a problem for birds migrating over Skagit County. People don’t inform Skagit Audubon about birds they might observe appearing confused by lights around buildings, industrial areas, or communication towers then colliding with them or flying in circles until exhausted. If you know of particular problem areas of this sort, please write me (conservation@skagitaudubon.org). When we have a sense of whether there are such problem locations, we can convene a small committee of Skagit Audubon members interested in working on this issue and draft an action plan to address it. There are examples to emulate from other Audubon chapters as described at Lights Out Program | Audubon.

Bird collisions with windows

A U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service study estimates that a billion, not a million, a billion, birds each year die from collisions with structures. The problem of bird collisions with windows is familiar to many of us because we witness it at home. National Audubon has advice on what you can do at your residence:  Reducing collisions with glass | Audubon. The American Bird Conservancy’s website goes into greater depth about measures to reduce collisions: Glass Collisions - American Bird Conservancy. This is another area where Skagit Audubon has little or no data and no systematic information. We don’t know which buildings and other structures in our community may be posing collision hazards for birds. If there are non-residential buildings in Skagit County where you have seen dead birds beneath windows, please let me know (conservation@skagitaudubon.org). We need data to establish whether a Skagit Audubon effort is needed beyond providing remedies for home use.

Great bird migration websites

Our focus in this effort is particularly, but not only, on birds during spring and fall migration. When April rolls around, begin regularly checking Bird Cast (https://birdcast.info/), which uses weather radar to generate real-time maps of bird migration. It’s amazing. Also check out National Audubon’s Bird Migration Explorer for maps of migration by specific species based on eBird and MOTUS transmitter data.

Please contribute information

So, please send me your suggestions and what information you may have about buildings, other structures, street lighting, etc. with upward directed and perhaps excessive night-time lighting (conservation@skagitaudubon.org). Please also send information about buildings and other structures where you have seen birds likely killed in window collisions. At home and in our larger community we can make conditions safer for birds year-round and especially those engaged in the incredible feat of migration.

Photo credit: Rufous Hummingbird by Spencer Follett/Macaulay Library

Conservation-by Tim Manns

Protecting Migratory Wintering Birds

Among the birds spotted during Skagit Audubon’s October 11th Big Sit fundraising event were several Red-throated Loons, the advance guard of many hundreds that Christmas Bird Count participants will note there near Deception Pass this December 27th. At this mid-October writing, Snow Goose flocks calling high overhead and the loons’ arrival remind us all that the Skagit region connects to faraway places whose birds depend on habitat both there and here. The same day as the Big Sit, coincidentally World Migratory Bird Day, Lynda Mapes’ article A push for ‘global energy dominance’ puts Alaskan wildlands at risk appeared in Seattle Times’ Pacific NW Magazine (A push for ‘global energy dominance’ puts Alaskan wildlands at risk | The Seattle Times and Home - World Migratory Bird Day). Mapes vividly describes a Red-throated Loon pair bringing fish to feed their fledglings on a pond in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area, an ecologically valuable place nominally protected within the National Petroleum Reserve – Alaska just off the Beaufort Sea. The reserve is the largest block of public land in the U.S. with much of its 23 million acres designated for supposed protection due to conservation values.

Red-throated Loons and other far north breeding species wintering in the Skagit for millennia are at risk from the Administration’s attempted acceleration of oil leasing in Alaska’s huge conservation areas. In 2006 National Audubon began a campaign to save Teshekpuk Lake and vicinity from oil leasing, and the area did receive some protection. Nonetheless, not many miles from the loons Mapes described, Conoco Phillips is preparing to drill for oil. The federal administration’s push for more fossil fuel extraction ramps up the threat to vital wildlife habitat in the far north. In the Arctic, global warming is proceeding much faster than at lower latitudes, changing the environment on which northern breeding species depend, affecting Red-Throated Loons in Alaska, affecting Skagit’s Snow Geese, all of which nest on Russia’s Wrangel Island.

Sign up for National Audubon’s Action Alerts so that you can add your voice to protecting vital Arctic breeding grounds: https://www.audubon.org/takeaction

Washington State Wildlife Action Plan - - Please comment

To be eligible for federal funding to conserve species at risk of decline, each state must have a State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) and update it every 10 years. Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife has released the draft of Washington’s updated plan for public review and comment. You can find the draft at https://wdfw.wa.gov/publications/02665  and fill out a comment survey at https://publicinput.com/j35032 (deadline: November 17, 2025.)

Wildlife Action Plans have existed since 2005, but funding to implement them has never been adequate. The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would remedy this by greatly increasing federal funding. This Act passed the House in 2022 on a bipartisan vote but has since failed to pass the full Senate. There does not appear to be movement on this legislation right now, but the bipartisan effort is still underway to remind Congress of the need. Skagit Audubon has supported passing this bill. The premise of the legislation is that spending money to stop the decline of species now will save money by preventing them from becoming endangered later and requiring much more expensive recovery efforts. For more information about this bill and the thinking behind it, see https://nwf.org/RAWA.

There is much that we can do: act locally, even while lending your voice to state and national campaigns to uphold environmental protections. Please see the conservation report in the September Skagit Flyer for suggestions on how you can help.  

Photo credit: Red-throated Loon nesting on Arctic tundra by Kai Frueh/Macaulay Library; www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Red-throated_Loon

Conservation-by Tim Manns

Shortly after taking office in January 2021 President Biden issued the “America the Beautiful for All” initiative with its commitment to conserve and restore at least 30 percent of federal public lands and waters by 2030. While this seemed an impossible goal, its ambition was inspiring, and the Administration made a concerted and somewhat successful effort to advance it, establishing new national monuments, wildlife refuges, and national marine sanctuaries and closing expanses of ocean to offshore drilling. While imperfect in its vision and implementation, the initiative did reflect the American public’s broad support for conserving lands, waters, and wildlife. In total, the Biden Administration put more acres into protected conservation status than any previous.

Unfortunately, initiatives born out of executive orders are often easily undone. Within its first month in office, the Trump administration cancelled the America the Beautiful Initiative and in the name of an imagined national energy emergency restricted federal agencies’ ability to protect wildlife on public lands. In September, the Administration allowed just 3 weeks for comments on the environmental impact statement the Forest Service will prepare as a required step towards undoing the 2001 Roadless Rule. The September Skagit Audubon Conservation Notes explains how this rule has for a generation protected over 50 million acres of public land the U.S. Forest Service manages for us (Page 1, No. 3: Sept25ConservationNotesUpdated083025.pdf).

Consistent with this deemphasis on conserving land, in September Secretary of Interior Douglas Burgum issued an order making it difficult to use the Land and Water Conservation Fund to acquire private in-holdings in national parks, a key purpose for establishing the Fund in 1965 (Secretary Burgum’s Order Weakens Land and Water Conservation Fund – The Coalition To Protect America's National Parks). Burgum’s order would also enable states to use the Land and Water Conservation Fund to buy federal lands, a far stretch from the Fund’s purpose up to now and a step down the slippery slope towards privatizing our collective public heritage.

I mention these three developments because they each represent a withdrawal from protecting the habitat our fellow creatures need to survive, part of Audubon’s core mission. It would be easy to continue listing the rollbacks of environmental laws and policies and the weakening of the federal land-managing agencies through reductions in staff and funding, but you all know this story. Last month’s Skagit Audubon Conservation Report urged that we all stay engaged and communicate to our elected representatives that we want our common lands and wildlife protected. This is not the time to throw up our hands and stand by while hard-fought conservation victories slide away.

The daily big news on environmental matters can distract us from the on-going need for local conservation supporters and volunteers. We’ll soon be getting a call from Conservation Northwest and the American Bird Conservancy to help with educational efforts concerning nesting Marbled Murrelets on the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. With the help of many local volunteers and supporters, local organizations such as Skagit Land Trust, Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group, and others continue their work of protecting and restoring habitat in Skagit County. The Land Trust’s recent acquisition of wetlands along the Samish River to protect Oregon Spotted Frog habitat (a federally listed species) is just the latest Trust success at acquiring wildlife habitat. There is much that we can do: act locally, even while lending your voice to state and national campaigns to uphold environmental protections. Please see the conservation report in the September Skagit Flyer for suggestions on how you can stay involved.

Photo credit: Bewick’s Wren by Joe Halton

Bewick’s Wren by Joe Halton

Conservation-by Tim Manns

Eleven years ago, National Audubon research pinpointed human-caused climate change as the greatest threat to two-thirds of North American bird species. This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its intention to rescind the 2009 “endangerment finding” in which the agency found that greenhouse gases threaten human health. This finding has been the legal grounding for federal bills and policies addressing the existential threat of climate change, now to be ignored because of the change in Administrations. Climate change will persist regardless.

The past eight months have been replete with reminders that conservation and environmental victories must be won over and over again. Policies and practices we take for granted are being wiped out from one day to the next, condemned as unnecessary or harmful, even, somehow, corrupt. The onslaught is so aggressive and demoralizing that the temptation is to feel helpless to protect what we value and to look away, to drop out. As people who care about the environment and about non-human life along with our own species, we rise to the occasion. This is the opportunity of a lifetime to stand up for what we value when it really counts, maybe an opportunity we’d rather not have, but here we are.

As we all know, there are many, many national issues of concern related to conservation and Audubon’s mission of preserving and restoring birds and other wildlife along with their habitat. Read the May 2025 Skagit Audubon Conservation Notes for a summary of several of those national issues, including the watering down of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act and of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. I’ll provide updates on these issues when there’s new information. (May25ConservationNotes.pdf, items numbered 2 and 5)

Federally funded research and long-term data collection on climate change along with measures to combat greenhouse gas emissions are being rolled back en masse. Agencies are no longer allowed to so much as mention climate change. We’re fortunate to live in a state where reality and science remain the basis for legislative action and where 62% of last November’s voters chose to uphold the Climate Commitment Act, major legislation addressing this truly existential threat to people and wildlife. We can still act at the state and local levels and must step up our efforts.

Undoing the Roadless Rule

In June of this year the Secretary of Agriculture, overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, announced plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule. For a generation this rule has  protected 58 million acres of our public forest lands (including over 2 million acres in Washington State), from clearcutting and unnecessary road building while the rule protects habitat for many species, safeguards drinking water, and provides opportunities for recreation in nature. Our national forests already have many more miles of road than can be maintained. This huge reversal of conservation policy accompanies the administration’s determination to vastly scale up logging on our national forests while waiving environmental review and public comment. We’ll join other conservation groups in speaking out against this raid on public lands that so threatens the habitat birds and other wildlife require.

Skagit County’s Critical Areas Ordinance update

On a happier note, Skagit County’s draft update of the Critical Areas Ordinance (CAO) mentioned in the June Conservation Notes continues to show improvements over the earlier version. You can read the comments Skagit Audubon submitted in May at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6474fc5db738031c56c2f6c4/t/682156d0debe032074423fef/1747015378744/Skagit+Audubon+coms+on+draft+updated+Critical+Areas+Ordinance+May+2025.pdf. For the second round of commenting I collaborated with Skagit Land Trust on its comments urging further improvements in the ordinance. Increased buffers, as in the plan, would be beneficial, and there is now some attention given to protecting wildlife corridors, but smaller wetlands are not yet sufficiently protected, and there is still a provision allowing some logging in riparian buffers. The Board of County Commissioners will decide on the final version of the CAO in a few months.

Join the Audubon Action National and Washington State networks

The May Conservation Report ended with a list of things we each can do to help support birds. Now that a few months have passed and environmental policies and programs have taken many more blows, it’s important to remember that being an active citizen is ultimately the most important thing we each can do to protect places, people, creatures, and conditions important to us. There are many good environmental groups to support, and Skagit Audubon keeps in touch with and works with a number of them on state and local issues. Audubon members can also advocate for regional and national protection of birds and other wildlife and their habitat by responding to action alerts from Audubon Washington and National Audubon. Enroll in Audubon Washington’s Action Network at Join Our Action Network | Audubon Washington particularly for Washington State issues. The National Audubon website (Advocacy & Action | Audubon) has abundant information on Audubon’s numerous current conservation campaigns. Sign up there to receive national alerts (Join Our Action Network | Audubon).

Last but not least, check the Conservation Notes posted on the Skagit Audubon website most months September through June for opportunities to comment to agencies and elected officials on the issues mentioned (https://www.skagitaudubon.org/conservation-notes-letters). If you would prefer receiving the Conservation Notes directly via email, let me know at conservation@skagitaudubon.org.

Photo credit: Townsend’s Warbler by Joe Halton