Twenty Years Ago
Since January 2014, Whatcom Watch has been
reprinting articles from issues printed 20 years ago.
The below article appeared in the March 2006 issue of Whatcom Watch.
Editor’s Note: Terence Wahl passed away in 2022 at the age of 91.
by Christian Martin
Terence Wahl has seen a lot of change in Whatcom over his 60-plus years of residence here. He remembers railroads that, before they were turned into trails crisscrossing the city, moved coal, timber and gravel from the resource-rich uplands to the bay. As a young child, he remembers touring the famous “Ironsides” battleship when the port still attracted an ongoing parade of seagoing vessels, remembers playing on an empty beach at Birch Bay before it was ringed with vacation homes and resorts, remembers the sharp, sulphuric stench from the Georgia-Pacific mill that once was a part of downtown Bellingham’s character. Wahl even recalls way back when The Bellingham Herald was an independent paper worthy of the pulp it was printed on.
Wahl has made a life out of witnessing, and writing down in turn, the changes he observes in the world around him. As a scientist and local birding expert, Wahl has authored several guides to birding in Washington and published papers tracking the changes in local bird populations. For over 30 years, he ran bird-watching tours on the Pacific out of Westport, systematically recording what he observed in what is perhaps the longest running data set for birds in the world.
But Wahl’s greatest professional achievement thus far is “Birds of Washington: Status and Distribution,” his magnum opus published last year (2005) by, ironically, the Oregon State University Press. Co-edited with Bill Tweit and Stephen G. Mlodinow, this weighty doorstop of a book represents the most comprehensive and contemporary effort to synthesize historical and current scientific studies, surveys and field reports to report on the population status and distribution of every bird species known to the Evergreen State.
While it is decidedly not a field guide for identifying birds ala “Sibley’s,” Wahl’s 436-page tome does detail each bird’s habitat, species diversity, seasonal distribution and fluctuating population numbers. It comments on environmental changes, conservation efforts and noteworthy records from both sides of the state. Ultimately, “Birds of Washington: Status and Distribution” establishes a baseline of what is known (through the year 2000) about Washington’s birds, both resident and migratory, that will prove to be invaluable to future scientific inquiries.
Wahl’s Book Accepted As a Benchmark
“The whole thing is a ballpark job,” Wahl said with characteristic modesty. “Nobody has the whole picture, but the book is accepted as a benchmark for this point in time.” He later pleaded that “this is hardly science—this is just going out and counting things!”
Not since Stanley Jewitt’s “Birds of Washington State” was published back in 1953 has anybody attempted to assemble and synthesize so much information on local bird life. And while Wahl recognizes Jewitt’s landmark publication as “a very good job,” the scientist’s resources were limited, with only a handful of people in the state actively birding. Fifty years later, thousands of Washingtonians are scanning the skies and seas for bird life, sharing their observations and questions on internet forums like Tweeters, communicating sightings almost instantaneously via cell phones and e-mail. Several important state and federal studies have increased the wealth of regional bird data, as have citizen efforts like breeding bird surveys and the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas bird count.
Another important development since the 1950s is the drastic changes to Washington’s natural environment as the statewide population has ballooned and development, in turn, boomed. The historical availability of bird habitat has been greatly compromised, as have the fecundity of feeding options.
This is an abbreviated version of the original March 2006 article. To read the entire 1,280 word article, see https://whatcomwatch.org/jan-2002-to-sept-2015/2006/3/php/WW_openf3e3.html?id=670
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When this article was written, Christian Martin was a freelance writer, English instructor at Whatcom Community College and a former features editor for The Bellingham Weekly.
