The work party and the goats were both a hit the weekend of April 24. A lot of maintenance was completed in the cleared areas, and the goats did their job admirably while also posing for pictures.

The spring season continues apace, with plants ending their blooming season, even fruiting, as others come into bloom. Warblers are passing through the park. Buffleheads and a pair of American wigeons are the only winter ducks that still linger in the Bay. The osprey and martins are back, as are our other three nesting swallow species. Baby mallards are out and about. Wood ducks have disappeared until their young are fledged, and gadwalls, who are later nesters, are the abundant duck in the bay.

Gulf of Mexico

I had other topics in mind for this column, but it is all overshadowed by the unfathomable catastrophe of the blown oil well in the Gulf of Mexico.

The economic and environmental effects are incalculable, and none of them positive that I know of. That five of the first twenty sea turtles autopsied did not die from oil contamination gives me little comfort. I am sure many will, along with plankton, fish, including blue fin tuna, sharks, manatees, shellfish, many migrating birds, many resident birds including many of the magnificent wading birds found only along the Gulf and in the Everglades, and untold sealife. As I explored the low tide flats at South Alki Saturday, admiring and marveling at the sea stars, anemones, sea cucumbers, clams, and shaggy mouse and lemon nudibranchs, whelks, moon snails, and other marvelous sea critters my heart was repeatedly stabbed as I thought of their relatives in the Gulf. Untold millions of their relatives and other sea life, some which does and some that does not live in our Sound, are dying, or will die, of poison, starvation, lack of sunlight, asphyxiation, in the Gulf because one critically located oil rig blew. The brant geese of Puget Sound feeding off Alki are fortunate that they winter here, not south of the United States. They do not migrate across the gulf and alight on the beaches and in the wetlands now being befouled and poisoned with spilt oil. I give thanks for each warbler and other migrant songbird that made it across the gulf and up to our Northwest before the blowout. Entire species may be lost, seafood and fishing industries will be wiped out, tourism destroyed – and let us not forget that in just six weeks seven refinery workers, 29 miners, and 11 oil rig workers died in fireballs while working in these United States.

Epilogue:

As I walk through our own

Small remnant wetland,

Rejuvenated with Lake Washington

By requiring Sewage Treatment,

Decades ago, I reflect.

I reflect on its resiliency

And also on its fragility.

That every “Successful restoration”

Of, and also the original biosystems

Left in this world, hang by a only

A few slender vulnerable threads

Of our future actions- or inactions.

Janice Johnson volunteers as a beach naturalist and Juanita Bay Park ranger.