Preserve dedication stirs up reverent memories

Soundings

By John Dodge | The Olympian • Published October 12, 2008

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Sometime this month, Joe Buchanan will grab his spotting scope and field notebook and head for the Kennedy Creek estuary for the 1,000th time over the past 30 years.

He will chronicle which species of shorebirds, waterfowl and raptors are present, note their abundance and bask in the biological diversity of the mudflats and salt marsh that juts out into Totten Inlet between Kennedy and Schneider creeks midway between Olympia and Shelton.

Keeping track of the 180 species he's seen in this midsize estuary since 1977 is a pastime and passion of Buchanan's, whose visits to Kennedy Creek are not part of his duties as a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.

"This is the first estuary I ever got to know," said Buchanan, 52.

Same here. When I was a young boy in the 1950s, my father would often take me to Kennedy Creek from our Shelton home to sit motionless for hours in duck-hunting blinds. I was young enough to still wet my pants and far too young to wield a shotgun.

I don't know of two people who love the Kennedy Creek estuary more than my dad, Dick Dodge, who hunted ducks there from 1947 to the early 1960s, and Buchanan, who bird watches with just as much passion.

Images of the Kennedy Creek estuary were etched vividly into my pre-adolescent mind — braided stream channels choked with spawning chum salmon, giving way to a salt marsh peninsula and sodden skies filled with flocks of mallard, pintail, green-winged teal, wigeon and canvasback ducks flying in from the north to feed in the tideflats and fields.

It was here I learned my first lesson in wildlife conservation. The population of canvasbacks, a large, sleek diving duck, suddenly crashed so the then state Department of Game invoked a harvest ban to protect them. I remember feeling sorry for canvasback ducks and lost my interest in shooting them, even after their numbers rebounded.

It was also during these sojourns that I came to realize I didn't share the same love of waterfowl hunting that drew my father to Kennedy Creek. Eventually, I gravitated to the bird-watching camp.