Stepping out into nature
Members of the Central Basin Audubon Society (Clockwise from left top): John Moody, Twila Herrin, Gayle Talbot, Margaret Schiffner, John Ham, Judy Rogers, Jackie Chase.
Charles H. Featherstone
An egret, a blue heron, and another egret on the property of Basic American Foods south of Moses Lake in early summer 2022 — examples of some of the migratory birds that come through the Columbia Basin.
A house finch in the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge. The Central Basin Audubon Society is looking for volunteers to help lead grade school field trips to the refuge.
MOSES LAKE — The Central Basin Audubon Society is looking for a few good volunteers.
“You don’t have to be a teacher,” said Gayle Talbot, president of the local Audubon Society. “You can be a person who’s just interested in children and interested in the environment.”
Every year, society volunteers lead field trips for elementary school students to the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, which covers about 30,000 acres between Moses Lake and Othello, mostly south of Potholes Reservoir, to see a relatively undisturbed example of the local environment and the wild creatures that live there or migrate through, said Talbot.
They are limited to the number of students they can take out right now, according to Talbot. Prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, the society had as many as nine local schools involved in the program, and money to cover the costs of transportation to and from the wildlife refuge.
“This year we have four schools signed up, but we can’t take more because we don’t have the number of volunteers that we used to have,” Talbot said. “Our group is aging and we’ve lost some key people that used to go out into the refuge because of not being able to handle the terrain.”
Talbot said she essentially became president of the Central Basin Audubon Society by default because she attended five meetings in a row and ended up being elected.
In fact, during a recent lunch meeting of the Moses Lake branch of the Washington State School Retirees Association, Talbot — herself a retired teacher — made the same pitch, looking for volunteers to help expand the program.
“If any of you are able-bodied and you love getting out in nature; if you love children; I hate to see a program die because of lack of volunteers,” she told those gathered at the Pillar Rock Grill for lunch. “It is such a unique experience for all of the students that I took out there. And really, not that many kids get to go out.”
For Margaret Schiffner, a long-time Audubon volunteer and the group’s current treasurer, it’s about showing them the importance of the local environment, everything from the basalt pillars which provide homes to cliff swallows and marmots to the shrub steppe and the seepage lakes south of Potholes Reservoir that provide a temporary stopping place for migratory birds as varied as mallard ducks and sandhill cranes.
Because, as Schiffner noted, it isn’t just about birds. It’s about all the creatures that make their way through the basin or call it home.
“Bats also use the cliffs, and kids don’t realize just how important bats are,” she said during her presentation. “They take and eat insects every night and a lot of the insects are the kind that are damaging to crops and things. So they are a very important species of wildlife.”
Too many people have no idea the Columbia Wildlife Refuge — one of 568 wildlife refuges across the United States, according to data available from the U.S. Department of the Interior — sits in the middle of Grant and Adams counties, Schiffner said. Wild animals need exactly the same things humans need — food, water, cover and space — and the kind of undisturbed nature set aside in wildlife refuges provides it.
“For a long time, I thought these kids aren’t remembering,” Schiffner said. “And then Gayle told me yesterday, they remember more than you realize.”
The Central Basin Audubon Society began its work with students in 1982, when a third-grade teacher in Othello asked her husband, then manager of the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge, to lead her class on a tour of the refuge. Over time, the program expanded to include schools in Othello, Royal City, Ephrata, Connell and Moses Lake, and the Central Basin Audubon Society became involved in 1994 with both classroom presentations about the ecology and wildlife of the refuge as well as field trips, according to CBAS annual report for 2019.
COVID halted the trips in 2020 and 2021, Talbot said, and they were slowly resumed in 2022. But the group is eager to get more students out to the refuge, and has more than enough money to get the classroom presentations and field trips started again.
They just need people.
For more information, or to volunteer, contact the Central Basin Audubon society at www.centralbasinaudubonsociety.org or email Gayle Talbot at gjstalbot@gmail.com.
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.
