> On Sun, 24 Aug 1997, Kelly McAllister wrote:

>"Well, I would certainly would have liked to have had a description of this
>"rather specialized and unique habitat". Dr. Irven Buss, who had
>studied Upland Sandpipers in other parts of their breeding range,
>found the east Spokane Valley habitat rather uninspiring. In fact,
>he could not understand what the birds saw in the place. His writings
>on the dry, stony ground where the sandpipers hung out was written in
>1979, before your observations of the unique and specialized qualities.
>Frankly, I think humans tend to remember things lost as more special
>than they really were."


In reviewing my photos of the habitat from 29 May 1983, when I observed a
mated pair of Uplands E of Spokane near the ID border, it still looks like
pretty nice prairie -- there were lots of native plants -- a few
bunchgrasses, Sidalcea, Castilleja, Lupinus, Geum triflorum, etc. While Dr.
Buss may not have been impressed and it was certainly far from pristine,
already showing signs of the weed invasion to come, it was still a fairly
decent remnant habitat, very similar to that which the sandpipers inhabit
in OR and a LONG way better that the waist-high weed-choked mess that I
found in the same spot 10 years later, which was without even a place for a
sandpiper to land, let alone nest! While I may have overstated the
"uniqueness" of this particular site, there is no question in my mind that
development and ultimately human-caused weed invasions have eliminated what
was once a valuable habitat area.

Mark