I went to the Federal Way City Council meeting last night to thank the council for their support of the West Hylebos Wetlands and the successful completion of the West Hylebos Boardwalk project (officially completed with the installation of the interpretive signs last week!). Mayor Jack Dovey saw me as I arrived and recruited me to lead the flag salute. That was a first for me (at least since something like First Grade).
Anyhow, the city council and city staff did great work to help make this project happen. If you see a council member, be sure to tell them how much you appreciate their support for the Hylebos.
The Sad Decline of Frogs
The Friends' old friend Klaus Richter is one of a few scientists parsing out the decline or red-legged frogs and other native amphibians in King County and the urban Puget Sound area (a.k.a Pugetopolis). Lynda Mapes writes in the Times of what science is telling us about the decline of amphibians and the mismatch between environmental regulations and the facts of the amphibian lifecycle.
What [scientists] found was a misfit between development regulations and the
actual lives of amphibians. The animals' movements through the seasons
of the year don't fit into tidy buffer zones, drawn in tight circles
around breeding ponds. The wetlands they use for breeding and rearing
are protected, but the success of those regulations is problematic. And
too often, roads slice right through the migratory corridors amphibians
use, and development devours the forests they need to live in much of
the year.
n seven of 18 King County wetlands surveyed between 1993 and 1997,
Klaus O. Richter, a senior ecologist for King County, found native
species declined and some even disappeared.
"It's not just the wetland alone that is really important," Richter
said. "They only use the wetlands for two weeks to a month, a very
limited time, when they go to the wetlands to breed. But then they go
to the forest to live their lives, and what we have found is that the
forests are disappearing, and getting smaller, and the access to them
is declining because of our sprawl."
Anecdotally, red-legged frogs seem to be thriving in the Hylebos, but Richter reminds us that amphibian species can disappear without humans even knowing.
"I've been going back [to a monitoring site near Bellevue] and looking, and I haven't seen a toad," Richter
said. He sees a diminishing, not only of the food chain and biological
diversity of the area, but of the human pleasure in living in a place
so alive. "It's sad," he said, "they are just gone. People don't even
know what used to be here. It's the extinction of experience."
Mapes' article reminds us of the importance of protected & interconnected habitat. Species often have life cycle niches that transcend one habitat type. The Hylebos Creek Conservation Initiative is so important for our watershed because it seeks to protect habitat across the habitat zones from wetland, riparian and upland forests.
If we're successful, perhaps the red-legged frogs will continue to thrive in the Hylebos.
