By Lynda V. Mapes Seattle Times environment reporter
POSSESSION SOUND, Everett, Washington — Now is the sweet season, with its lengthening days and warm radiance of spring on Puget Sound.
The return of the light is rousing the natural world from dormancy. Puget Sound is on the rebound, not only in the turn of the season, but in a resurgence of life.
Today there are more humpbacks and gray whales, more harbor porpoises and seals, more sea lions and more orcas in these waters than a generation ago. These surging populations are the result of decades of protection. An exception are southern resident killer whales, an endangered species. They, and the Chinook salmon the southern residents primarily eat, are struggling for survival against an array of threats.
Jennifer Olson, left, Josh Searle (in blue, center), and Katherine Dye check water samples collected as Ardi Kveven, at the rail, cleans equipment on Possession Sound. (Alan Berner / The Seattle Times)
But there is another story underway here, too, of a marine mammal comeback in Washington from the urban waters of Puget Sound, to the seascapes of the San Juan Islands. The ordinary places we think we know onshore are an altogether different matter seen — and heard — from the water, where the creatures with whom we share this place are cavorting in a spring catenation of life.
In an uncertain world, made even more precarious by a warming climate, it’s also important to celebrate what’s getting better, and understand that changes we make can allow nature to heal and recover.
Ardi Kveven was at the helm of the research vessel Phocoena just offshore of Everett on a recent spring morning. She had the vessel built with funding from the National Science Foundation for the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA) she directs at Everett Community College. The program instructs kids in the science, wonder and history of Puget Sound through a curriculum centered on getting students out on the water.
Instructors use an interdisciplinary approach, with all hands literally on deck, as professors of English, history and science all explore what Puget Sound can teach. And who knew there was so much to see and explore, all within sight of Interstate 5, whizzing by in the distance?
Here was a menagerie in an ecosystem that actually starts in the forests miles away, in the Snohomish River.
“Marbled murrelet!” called out Kveven, pointing to a chunky pair of birds bobbing in the blue not far off the bow of the boat. These birds nest in the forests of the Cascades and fly all the way to the estuary of the Snohomish River, where they feed on sand lance, herring, and other fish they take back to their forests nest.
The Snohomish also carries the nutrients and silty sediment in a freshwater plume all the way out to these nearshore waters of Puget Sound around Whidbey and Camano islands. Ghost shrimp feast on the detritus, as they burrow in the soft silt — and become a meal for one of the largest animals in the Sound: gray whales.
Snuffling in the mud, a small population of gray whales, nicknamed the Sounders, has taught itself to split off from the northbound migration of grays each spring for a side trip to this estuary, for a ghost shrimp snack that plumps them up before they return to the rest of the population to finish their trip.
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