Protecting a Fragile Eastern Washington Habitat, Steppe by Steppe

For some, the emptiness of eastern Washington’s shrub-steppe country ranks just above commercial signage when it comes to roadside landscapes.

From the vantage of Interstate 90 at 70 mph--as intimate as many people get with shrub-steppe--the terrain appears drab: grayish green sagebrush here, yellow bunch grass there, interrupted only by barren dirt and rock.

That made New York native Karen Wieda leery when she moved from Seattle to Eastern Washington eight years ago.

“Honestly, I thought then that this was one of the ugliest places anywhere,” she said. “But I’ve totally changed. Now, I know how beautiful it is.”

Wieda spreads the word about shrub-steppe through her work as a science education specialist at the Hanford nuclear reservation, which is plagued with a vast radioactive mess yet blessed with eastern Washington’s best-preserved shrub-steppe.

The long-ignored landscape is finally gaining respect through a new book, a private land-conservation campaign and the recent federal designation of a chunk of Hanford’s shrub-steppe as a wildlife refuge.

The initiatives are an effort to protect habitat that advocates see as increasingly threatened by suburban sprawl and agricultural development.

About two-thirds of more than 10 million acres of continuous sagebrush and bunch grass habitat have disappeared since white settlers arrived and transformed shrub-steppe into irrigated farmland, cities and towns.

The book “Singing Grass, Burning Sage: Discovering Washington’s Shrub-Steppe” was published in October in hopes of generating the same type of public awareness that spurred protection of old-growth forests on the wet side of the Cascade Mountains in western Washington.

“I think there are a lot of misperceptions out there. Shrub-steppe is every bit as rare as old-growth forest, but it’s just not as well known,” said Curt Soper, conservation director with Washington’s chapter of the Nature Conservancy, the book’s publisher.

While old growth’s attraction is its crowded chaos of tree and plant life, shrub-steppe’s draw is the vast horizons made possible by sparse flora.

“It’s all right out there in the open, and there’s nothing impeding you,” said author Jack Nisbet, a South Carolina native who was captivated by the landscape after moving to eastern Washington in 1970.

Shrub-steppe covers most of eastern Washington’s Columbia Basin and also spills over into parts of northeastern Oregon and northern Idaho.

The landscape owes its uniqueness to the collapse 13,000 years ago of an ice dam that formed glacial Lake Missoula in present-day Montana.

Scientists think that a 1,000-foot wall of water, ice and debris rushed westward, carving channels--or coulees--and stripping the landscape to dark basalt bedrock in a section of shrub-steppe called the channeled scablands.

The floods recurred several times over a few thousand years, forging a landscape that geologists have studied in hopes of determining whether life could exist on Mars, which scientists believe also may have been scoured by floods.

Shrub-steppe’s sparse rainfall--as little as 6 inches a year at Hanford--combines with hot summers and cold winters to create a fragile habitat that is home to rare plants and animals.

Along with healthy populations of hawks, coyotes, rabbits and other critters, shrub-steppe is home to the spotted bat, a rare species that was undocumented in Washington until 1991.

Another resident is the Columbia sharp-tailed grouse, a species known for its elaborate mating dance. Federal officials are considering listing the grouse as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

In addition to the rare plants, there are dozens of unique lichens and bugs. In the last five years, Washington State University entomology professor Richard Zack has identified 35 new insect species at Hanford alone.

Most of the 560-square-mile site has remained untouched since World War II, when it was set aside for the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal was manufactured there until the 1980s, and cleanup is Hanford’s new mission.

“Hanford is like a window into the past,” Zack said. “We’re looking at a very large site that is probably very much like it was before Europeans arrived.”

In November, President Clinton designated 57,000 acres of Hanford lands as a federal wildlife refuge, a step sought by environmentalists for more than a decade. The parcel along the Columbia River’s last free-flowing stretch had served as a security buffer, and local interests had pushed to have the land made available for limited development, recreation and farming.

Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy has embarked on its own shrub-steppe protection program. The nonprofit organization has purchased about 9,000 acres of shrub-steppe in the last three years.

At more than 3,000 acres each, the Beezley Hills Preserve in Grant County and Moses Coulee in Douglas County are the organization’s largest preserves statewide. Eight of the group’s 37 Washington preserves are shrub-steppe lands.

To author Nisbet, the beauty of the remaining shrub-steppe could be its salvation. The public will push for the land’s protection if it can experience that beauty up close, he hopes.

“The shrub-steppe is a very powerful place,” he said. “It will do its own work if it is given a chance, if you can see it.”