Ebey Island Wildlife Area

Sal is a voice that rides along as you drive Washington's roads: the road ahead, the pass, the stories of the places you pass.

Most of the Ebey Island unit is grassland, over 800 acres of it, with farm fields and fallow ground and Baltic rush mixed in. The forested swamp is the smaller piece, about 400 acres. It was logged in the 1890s and nobody replanted it. The trees came back on their own, and the result is a Sitka spruce swamp, a kind that has become scarce in this part of the Snohomish River estuary. Forks of Deadwater Slough run the length of the unit, north to south, and ponds, ditches and sinkholes are scattered through it. The estuary matters to young chinook salmon, which rear there. Pheasants get released each fall, and waterfowl hunting draws a crowd. Much of the unit stays closed in the off season so the nesting ducks can be left alone. [1]