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Orondo on the Columbia

Coming Into Place, Orondo, Douglas County

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Coming Into Place, Orondo, Douglas County

By Jessi Mendoza 

My parents immigrated to North Central Washington from the state of Michoacan, Mexico in the 1970’s when they were both teenagers. Growing up in the small village Coahuayana, near the Pacific Ocean, they wanted to live in a small town so they followed family members who were already living in Central Washington. They both have siblings who spoke highly about the beauty and abundance of the area. Jobs, housing, and excellent weather were among the things that attracted them to come here. 

My Father

My dad originally moved to Yakima, where he had many family members who were working in the agricultural industry. He heard rumors of the Wenatchee Valley and the many opportunities for work with excellent wages. Along with my uncle, they decided to take the risk and make the move to the valley. 

The first stop was Entiat. They didn’t have much luck finding work at first since there were already many workers moving into the area. They kept hearing about these well-paying jobs available with free housing so their search continued. They headed north and stopped at Lake Chelan, where my Uncle Salomon found a job. But since they only had room for one new employee, my dad and a friend continued the search and found jobs in the beautiful Twin W Orchard on the Columbia near Orondo that included livable wages and housing. They worked hard and felt like they could build a life in this new country. Their hard work paid off as they both received work residency permits in order to work peacefully. 

My Mother

My mother was curious to see what it was like to live and work in the USA. So, as a 15-year-old teenager she decided to move to Orondo, in 1975. She received help from my aunt who was working in Lake Chelan at a fruit packing shed. Unfortunately, she came during the winter which was a shock to her as she was used to palm trees, sunny weather, and being able to walk outside whenever she wanted.

Staying at home all day while my aunt and uncle worked was not only lonely, but she felt like a prisoner, locked inside without being able to comfortably go outside. She immediately wrote a letter pleading to my grandmother to send money in order to send her back to Mexico. My aunt explained the benefits of the spring and summertime and convinced my mom to not send the letter. Her decision to stay paid off because she met my father later that year. My mother Eva and my father Jesus met in the Twin W Orchards in Orondo when they were coincidently matched up as picking partners.

My mom’s dad was a cattle farmer, butcher, grocery store owner, and corn farmer in the mountains of Santa Maria, Michoacan. My mother and her seven siblings helped my grandparents in various ways with the farm and the store. Both my mom and dad had to leave school by the third grade to financially support their families. Back in Mexico my dad did manual labor cleaning up yards and providing landscaping services, while my mom helped customers in my grandparent’s grocery store.

My mom eventually started her own daycare business out of our home in Orondo shortly after having my younger brother German in 1991. She was tired of working in the orchard and also working in the fruit shed in Chelan. She became an entrepreneur just like my grandparents.

My Childhood

As a young Hispanic kid growing up around apple and pear orchards in Orondo, it was like having the largest playground I could ever ask for. With views of the mighty Columbia River, I knew I was living in a special place. I enjoyed walking down to the river and fishing on the river banks. My family and I lived in housing provided by the orchard owners in the middle of Twin W Ranch. The orchard had mostly apple trees including red delicious, gala, and golden delicious. There were a few acres with Bartlett pears as well. 

There were only a couple dozen families living in Twin W, but lucky for me I had many cousins who living there and were close to my age. My cousins and I would play games in the middle of the orchards and go on adventures to distant areas. Growing up with family members and having many large gatherings made this place feel like home. 

The Orondo School- A Gathering Place

I enjoyed going to school in Orondo because of the great teachers who  made learning fun. I was able to relate to many of my Hispanic classmates in school but it was tough sometimes at first connecting with others because I only knew Spanish. After learning English in preschool and kindergarten I was able to make other friends who were not Hispanic. The teachers and community were and still are very welcoming to the Hispanic culture and people. We would all have fun at the Orondo scholarship fundraisers, Bingo Night being the most popular. Everyone got along and was there for a great cause. It felt great to belong to such a generous and kind community. And although both of my parents didn’t know English they still participated and donated when they could.  

The Orondo School was a great gathering place for many community members to go in and obtain any type of help they may need. My parents and countless other family members took advantage of English classes hosted at the school. This was a tremendous benefit as they were able to better communicate with upper management, excel at their jobs, and be promoted.

I reflect and how much fun I had at the Orondo School and am very happy when I am able to help out during the Bingo Night Fundraiser. I see so many familiar faces and I remember why this place feels like home. Occasionally I will run into other Orondo alums who look familiar and get this instinctual reaction that they are from my home. They grew up in Orondo. 

It’s great to see these people around in the community. I enjoy going back to Orondo and seeing folks come together regardless of differences in cultures and race. Most community members work in the agriculture industry and they are able connect, relate, and bond because of that.

Working hard

My parents remain humble and grateful to this day and they instilled that in me and all my siblings. My parents brought with them a strong work ethic, a desire to learn, and a dream to create a better life for themselves and their family. They built just that and have given my siblings and I the best opportunity we could ever have hoped for. This is the best country we could be in to make our dreams come true. My mom and dad sacrificed so many things in order for my siblings and I to pursue an education. All my siblings and I have a college education because of what they instilled in us. 

My parents left their home country and everything that they have ever known, coming to the U.S. unable to speak English, in order to pursue something better. That was going far beyond their comfort zone, an example that has taught me to push myself harder in order to make my own dreams come true which I believe sets me up for success. I will follow the example they have provided by always working hard, remaining persistent, having a vision for what I want then going after it and making it happen!

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Coming Into Place, Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills

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Coming Into Place, Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills, Douglas and Grant counties

By Nancy Warner 

Most of us who live in North Central Washington came from someplace else. Except for tribal members whose roots go back hundreds and hundreds of years, the rest of us either came from families who immigrated from other states and countries or we came here on our own, sometimes at the urging of friends.   

Regardless of when and how we arrived, most of us were drawn here by an enticing mix of opportunities, hopes, and dreams. In the late 1800s, it may have been the chance to homestead and own your own farm. By the 1930s it might have been the prospect of finding work in the orchards and building a better life for your family that spurred your move. More recent stories include those about people moving here from bigger cities to improve the quality of their daily lives – to enjoy a slower pace in beautiful space.   

Collectively, when we immigrated here – from as far away as Germany or as close as Seattle – we brought values, traditions, knowledge, and skills that have helped shape this place. That’s something we all have in common. As immigrants, we’ve also all experienced the need to find help along the way – help in getting oriented to a new landscape and community, help starting a new job and making new friends – help making this place feel like home, a place where we belong.     

For me, it was the chance to contribute to the conservation of the wide-open sagebrush country – or shrub-steppe – that prompted my family to move here from Colorado in 2000. My husband Chuck and I had been working as program managers for The Nature Conservancy since the 1980s, an international non-profit organization dedicated to conserving plants, animals and natural systems. We enjoyed the challenge of trying to balance conservation with farming, ranching, and the maintenance of strong, rural communities. We liked the process of really getting to know a place and the people and working with them to find ways to make nature and people thrive.   

So we were excited to have the chance to start a new program for the Conservancy that would focus on working with other private and public landowners in the Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills area of Douglas and Grant counties. We were fired up about conserving the shrub lands, wildflowers, and wildlife that together represent the most ecologically diverse and threatened habitat type in Washington. To succeed we would have to understand the needs of the plants and animals – from pygmy rabbits to Indian tobacco – as well as those of neighboring farmers, ranchers, and public land managing agencies. We needed to be able to think like a whole community, human and non-human alike.

As lifelong westerners, we quickly felt at ease in the landscapes here where residents with the deepest roots of all, such as sagebrush and ponderosa pine, were old friends we knew from other places. Their presence, along with that of many other familiar plants and animals quickly made us feel at home here. I still remember how thrilling and comforting it was to see sandhill cranes soaring above the cliffs of Moses Coulee that first spring we were here. Talk about indicators of a good place to live!

But other things were new to us particularly basalt, the dark molten rock that dominates and defines the shrub steppe in the Columbia Basin. The significantly shorter winter and longer summer days of the Northwest also claimed our attention at first. And while I’ve always loved apples, we had never lived in a place where there were so many orchards – apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, and apples – presenting wave after wave of blooms through the spring. We had also known some pretty big rivers in other parts of the West, but nothing like the Columbia and the hydroelectric dams that still and channel its flow.   

So our eyes and ears were wide open as we began learning about the shrub-steppe and human communities of our new home. We spent a good deal of time in the field doing the typical start-up things for our line of work – exploring the landscape and helping with field surveys as well as reading reports, attending meetings, and developing the network of contacts that could help us frame effective land management and restoration decisions. 

While we had a great circle of researchers and land managers to work with, many of them having had years of experience in this landscape, it quickly became clear that we needed more information about past human use of the Moses Coulee-Beezley Hills area to effectively think like a community and consider the roles of grazing, hunting, farming, traditional gathering, and wetland and upland restoration in the management of the Conservancy’s lands. As it turned out, many of our neighbors and longtime residents were willing to help us fill in some of those information gaps by allowing us to record their stories.  

This practice of gathering oral histories, ground-tested knowledge earned by the people who had lived in a place for a long time, was one of the interests and skills I brought with me to this region. I’d reached out to local residents for help in better understanding a landscape before, gathering oral histories in other places we’d lived including Cache Valley in Utah, the Carrizo Plain in California and the San Luis Valley in Colorado. In all of these places I’d found people anxious to help me get my bearings in a new home – to help me understand how a given landscape or community works by sharing their memories and insights – their experiences, what they’ve seen and learned over the years, and what they appreciate about their place. 

People also shared photographs, documents, equipment and other things along with their stories. In the process they helped me feel more welcome and at home – helped me populate an unfamiliar landscape with meaningful stories that I could build upon over time. And, without the formal structure of a service club, these interviewees and neighbors also helped me expand my network by recommending and introducing me to other people who could help me broaden and deepen my education about this place.   

Recognizing the value of these stories and the process of gathering them, I began to work with a new organization, the Initiative for Rural Innovation & Stewardship (IRIS) to expand this practice starting in 2005. Since then, I’ve been working with IRIS and many partners to gather, share, and care for nearly 600 stories about successes in this region in formats that range from audio recordings and videos to photo collections and printed publications. See www.ncwcollections.org

Those of us with IRIS believe that the process of gathering and sharing success stories enhances a sense of belonging, inspires action and builds community – all conditions that lead to success. Together this collection of stories helps us learn more about the nature of this place – the natural landscape and the human community, informs actions about what works, and highlights core values that continue to shape the way we live in this place. We hope you enjoy sampling these stories. We invite you to share them with others and to add your own story of success that can help others come into this place.   

Lemoine-landscape

Coming Into Place -Lamoine, Douglas County

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By Lauren Paige Loebsack

A child born to a farming family is born into a world deeply connected with the seasons.  We are children growing up whose home lives ebb and flow with the changing demands of weather and growth cycles.  We are immersed in a world of observation and consideration of the sky.  We can recite the years of hard winters, drought and bounty.  I have watched again and again my world awaken in the spring, the bare earth revealed as the snow melts away, the shy green hue of the fragile first shoots of wheat turn into seas of green that fade to gold.  Then shorn, naked, exposed and patient for its winter rest and the cycle to unfold again, each one its own chapter in the story of this place.

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The farm is place and family.  The pictures on our walls capture the changes in both as they grow together with the larger world.  Children grow taller, mature, grandparents disappear.  Behind them, the backdrop of the farm does the same.  In one of oldest pictorial records of my family homestead, the new, simple square house sits singularly against the rolling hills of wheat, my great-grandfather, with his father and others, stands beside a mule drawn wagon topped with sacks of wheat, all cast in sepia tones.  Later, the picture now in color, my grandfather operates an open cab combine, his face lost behind a kerchief and sunglasses to protect from the dust and chaff.  

The house in the background has grown too, a large addition, an out building, the trees planted a generation before now tall and filled in.  Later, the combines have closed cabs and each sports a painted number, “1” through “4”.  Grandpa Lawrence was “Unit 1”, my great uncle Leland “Unit 2”, my father “Unit 3” and my cousin David “Unit 4”.  My father still uses “Unit 3” as his radio handle, though we have had only one combine for nearly two decades. A recent picture, now on social media, features the smiling face of my baby sister as she drives the combine, my niece sitting beside her.  They wave from the comfort of a sleek, air-conditioned cab atop a massive green machine.  

My great, great grandparents came out West with so many others during the Homestead Act, pausing in North Dakota long enough to catch their breath and scratch up some food.  The farm they would come to tend looked much like the idyllic image many Americans probably have of the family farm.  Children worked as they could, the youngest on simple tasks like gathering the eggs from the hen house, the older children taking on new tasks as their strength and dexterity allowed.  Farmers pushed their wide brimmed hats up over their weathered face to cool their brow for a moment, with work shirts tucked into slacks held up over wiry frames by suspenders.  The women wore skirts and gathered beans from the garden in their aprons. 

Quietly, less visibly, but like the equipment and the people, the ways we farm have changed.  Once the farm was Life, cut out from the earth.  We farmed to survive, to grow the food that literally sustained the family.  The farm then became a career, albeit a unique one, and industrialization changed the game to one of economic prosperity.  One could, if hard working and lucky enough, make a living, go on vacation, retire.

Now farms face a new world, one of sustainability.  From the soil, what many would call dirt, farmers coax out a plant that becomes food for many.  The machines and chemicals now available can outpace Mother Nature’s ability to respond.  This soil can be worked to death.  It takes a millennium for the sun and rain to weather rock into a skiff of top soil and all can be swept away by a single wind storm or rain event.  The farmer will watch with dread as the needed rain falls too hard, too fast and scours deep cuts into the carefully tended field.  Farmers now employ “no-till” farming methods, along with many other efforts that include GPS driven machinery and thorough meteorological research to protect our most precious partner: the land.

Loebsack-sister

I grew up in a little community once called Arup, but that I have always known as Lamoine.  The legend, if you can call such a story “legend”, goes that Arupp was founded ahead of the railroad, hoping to be that special place the trains would pass through.  When the post office was being secured, a new name was chosen by a Mr. Leonard Nathan Bragg who ran the general store at the time, naming it Lamoine after a brand of sardines he carried on his shelves.  Why the name was changed from Arupp is lost to time.  The house I called home, that I still think of as “home”, sits cozied up to Road G.  Just a few hundred feet to the east, in a field, still stands the remains of the old Lamoine school house.  We spent a lot of time there as children, chasing pigeons around the rafters and playing all manner of pretend, until the little building was deemed unsafe by our mothers.  The farmer who owns the land still plows around the little building, respectful, giving it enough room to stand against time.  A sign was installed beside it, on the north side so as to be visible from the highway.  The sign reads “Lamoine School 1915-1924”.

In the wide-open spread of the Waterville plateau, we keep our landmarks for practical and personal purposes.  They dot the land, mileposts of the history of settlement and the changing interpretation of the American dream.  This practice of letting time, not man, determine the lifespan of these landmarks illuminates a deep truth: that the land, this place, is an enduring member of the family, growing with us all, shaped by deliberate action and natural courses, the matriarch that binds together the rest of the family.  She both rules and serves us, watches us grow and leave and return, embraces our husbands and wives and children, all with an innate wisdom to be what each generation needs.

Loebsack-Farm-Harvest-2021

Now, as a woman no longer bound to the cycles of the farm, sometimes what I need is just to visit, to feel the comfort of that enduring presence and the memories it has held for generations.  Like my father, I like to set out on a drive to “check on the wheat”, to see a particular hill and think of the times we’ve been there before and be inspired by the endurance of the earth and those who have worked it.  To remember that I sprouted from here, will become a seed that is dropped to awaken as the roots of the next crop, in the same earth as my fore fathers. 

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Coming Into Place

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Introduction

By Nancy Warner
Initiative for Rural Innovation & Stewardship

Most of us who make our home here in North Central Washington came from someplace else. Regardless of when and how we arrived, most of us were drawn here by an enticing mix of opportunities, hopes, and dreams. And when we came, we also brought values, traditions, knowledge, and skills with us – characteristics that have helped shape this region. 

That’s something we all have in common. We all have a story – stories that when shared can grow understanding not just about each other but also about our communities. 

Gathering those stories and sharing them in ways that can help people connect around success in the region has been the work of IRIS for the past 15 years. One of the more than 300 recorded stories IRIS has collected and archived with the North Central Washington Library is that of David Weber – a descendant of pioneer farmers whose story is one example of why Quincy sees itself as a place of “Opportunities Unlimited.”

Weber Ridge Farms in Grant County

David Weber – Harvest Time, 2017

“It’s a desert, pure and simple”, wrote Lieutenant Thomas Symons in the 1870’s after making a several year study of the Columbia Basin for the Army Corps of Engineers. It’s always been one of my favorite quotes, as it shows the difficulty of not only living here, but of making a living in agriculture as well. It makes you wonder, why would anyone choose to live in the Quincy Valley? Well, I choose to live here, and am still farming some of the same ground as my grandparents who chose to come here 115 years ago, despite the words of Thomas Symons.

My grandparents probably didn’t know any better. They were German Russians immigrants, who staked everything to come to America in 1902. With deteriorating conditions for German speaking people in Russia, they knew it was time to “get out”. One brother in the family, whom we call Uncle Adam, came first to America in the late 1800’s, thinking to follow many other Germans and settle in Nebraska or the Dakotas. But while on the train, he met a man, probably a developer or promoter of some sort, who told him he really needed to go to Walla Walla, Washington, as the whole region had Homestead Act land for the taking, the last of it in the United States. This meant an opportunity to acquire their own farm land much faster than in other areas. Uncle Adam followed this advice, possibly even taking a loan from the man. After being in Walla Walla for a while, this industrious and entrepreneurial man found land to buy in the Odessa and Ritzville areas, then Quincy. Other family began immigrating, and my grandparents and two small children came over through Ellis Island in 1902, taking the train west to Odessa and arriving in Quincy via horse and wagon.

What they must have thought when they arrived here, a place of only around 8 inches of precipitation a year, after leaving the beautiful Russian steppes of the Volga. There is a family story of how my grandmother cried into the pancake batter nearly every morning with the dust swirling around their first home, a tent. She had left her mother and father behind, never to see them again! They certainly didn’t gain an easier life by coming here, but the main difference was in the freedom to choose their own path. They embraced the hardships with a strong faith in God, a knowledge of farming, hard work ethic, extended family that all worked together and an ability to find fulfillment in the simple things of life. They never expected to become wealthy, but rather to work in harmony with the earth to sustain their family, as generations before them had done.

I now reap the benefits of that legacy and of the difficult decision to leave everything they knew behind, and start anew. From them, I carry the pioneer spirit on. This is the place I call home.

David Weber – Harvest Time, 2017

Mary O'Brien

The Art of Self Sufficiency:

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Taking Care and Preserving Food on the Waterville Plateau

One thing I’ve come to understand after gathering stories for the past 15 years, everyone has a story and something to teach us about caring for this place if we invite them to share. Sometimes those stories are about restoring the health of a landscape; sometimes they are about helping a family business thrive. But one story that has been front of mind in recent days is that farmer Mary O’Brien shared about her lifelong practice of preserving food. While she helped me learn more about specific skills, such as butchering chickens and canning meat, the take-home message from this interview that seems timely to our current social-distancing challenge is this: no matter where you live, country or city, taking care of yourself and your family is also taking care of community.

Excerpts from the 2006 interview with Mary O’Brien are included in the following transcript of the Gathering Our Voice program broadcast on KOHO Radio. The recording and transcript of the full interview will be available this fall as part of the Thinking Like a Community archive.

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Nancy Warner: It’s possible to find signs of spring high on the Waterville Plateau by late February. Sagebrush buttercups and parsleys blooming on south-facing slopes. Flocks of sandhill cranes flying overhead. An early Say’s phoebe perched on a fencepost. But to get a glimpse of summer the best place to go this time of year is underground. Underground into the root cellars of longtime residents such as Mary O’Brien, where the warmth and color of the growing season sits ready to use in the jars that line her shelves.

Putting up enough food to take care of herself and her family throughout the year is a tradition in Mary O’Brien’s family. Born in 1928 near Conrad Montana, Mary came out to Douglas County to work in her uncle’s orchard the summer of 1946. The following year she married local farmer John O’Brien and moved out to the family’s place where she’s lived ever since. She describes how she learned the skills, from canning fruit to butchering chickens, that enable her to be so self-sufficient.

Mary O’Brien: We were in 4H in Montana and mother said if you’re gonna raise chickens for 4H you’ve got to learn to butcher them. So that’s what she taught me and that’s what I did. (laughs) And milked cows and everything else.

NW: Tell me a little bit about actually butchering a chicken.

MO: I always kill them and put them in boiling hot water and dip them in the water until the feathers come loose and then you pick em. Then I singe them and put them in a tub and then I dress em and you cut behind the tail and down and then draw the insides out. And then that all comes out in one piece. Then I soak em in cold water until the blood was out of them.

NW: With stores many miles away, Mary has taken care to preserve as much of her food as possible. For her and others like her who live in remote rural settings it’s a matter of convenience.

MO: Well I live 20 miles from town and there’s lots of times I didn’t have things ready to use so I’d can them and then I had things on hand.

NW: Yeah you were telling me about sometimes you’ve been stuck out here in the wintertime for 2 weeks at a time.

MO: We always had plenty on hand. You know we had canned meat, we had canned chicken, I canned vegetables, we always had plenty to eat. There for a while we milked a cow and I churned and had butter and everything. But we had everything we needed. If we got snowed in, we got snowed in.

NW: Did you learn much from your parents directly?

MO: Everybody took a job. And there was eight of us and mother raised a garden and that was a large garden and then we’d help her you know like shellin peas and gettin the vegetables and helping her do everything. And she canned a lot of fruit. I had an aunt and uncle in Orondo that had an orchard and they would send her boxes of fruit on the train from Wenatchee to Conrad. And Dad would go in there and get them. And we helped Mother can. A lot of the meat like the pork dad would put down and a brine in stone jars. Stone crocks and sometimes Mom would can cause they didn’t have freezers to put them in. So mother would can so much and then they’d take the hams and they made sausage. And Mom would always fry her sausage and then put it in the stone jars and put lard on it, you know, cover it with lard. And then she’d fry another batch and that’s the way she filled the stone jar. And when we want to eat it, we just
go out there and take her pan and spoon and dig the lard back and get the sausage and put it in the skillet and she’d heat it and then we’d have fresh sausage.

NW: So, when it came time to fix dinner it was really fast?

MO: Yeah.

NW: All you had to do was warm it up!

MO: You’d have to take it out of the – make sure you got it out and it was sealed again. The crock would seal. Otherwise you’d spoil it, you know, if you got air in there. They had an old cellar at home. That’s where a lot of the stone jars were put down. And mother would keep them covered. She’d make her own cheese and that was home. They lived quite a ways from town. Well they kind of had a smokehouse and that’s where they’d hang the hams until they were cured. And then they would go down in the cellar.

NW: If you were sent down to the root cellar say when you’re a little girl of eight and you’re helping your mom get dinner, could you just describe what that root cellar looked like? What all would be in there?

MO: Well, it had steps to get into it and then she had jars and jars of canned vegetables. Beef and peas and then they’d take their beets and cabbage and they put them in a kind of an underground thing and cover them with dirt. They’d never freeze but then when spring came Dad would go out there and dig up some of that and we had fresh cabbage or you know whatever he had put in there. That’s the way they did things cause they didn’t have deep freezes or refrigerators.

NW: So, cabbages and carrots and beets and potatoes?

MO: And rutabagas.

NW: Do you like rutabagas

MO: Yeah, I do.

NW: How do you cook em?

MO: Well you course peel them and then mother used to put them in stew and it was good.
(laughs)

NW: Mary remembers the method that was used to can meat in the days before pressure cookers came into use.

MO: Years ago, they canned their meat in boilers. You know, they’d put them in the boiler and water and they’d cook them for four hours. A great big boiler like this and then Mother had little boards across the bottom of it. But it was made to fit the boiler and you took the jars on there and put it on the stove and you just let it boil for and there’s some people do it that way yet.

NW: Waste not want not was more than a saying in Mary’s family. She describes how even large game could be fit into small jars after her brother and his friends returned from a hunting trip one day.

MO: And the came home with four or five elk. Mother didn’t have any way to take care of them. So, she canned. We had elk steak for breakfast, we had elk! (laughing). But you know we were young and we didn’t think anything of it

NW: You’ve always been out. Tell me a little bit about how you’re so comfortable living in isolation.

MO: Well it’s lonesome sometimes but its home and I love it. (laugh) But you know where’s your home is that’s where you make it.

NW: For Gathering Our Voice, I’m Nancy Warner.

O'Brien Placefinder (1)
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All Ears in Moses Coulee:

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Sharing Surprise with a Spotted Bat

BY NEAL HEDGES

The spotted bat was flying low through a dry wash near Dutch Henry Falls in Moses Coulee looking for a meal on a warm August night. Guided by echolocation, the bat flew swiftly through the night hunting noctuid moths that feed on coyote tobacco, Nicotiana attenuate, a fragrant annual plant that had bloomed in the coulee following a series of channel-scouring floods the previous winter.

Two hundred yards to the east, three people listened to the faint insect-like clicks, taking notes on the number of calls and the direction of the bat’s travel.Later that night they would report their findings to a group of 40 volunteers from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) who were here to gather information about the distribution of the spotted bat that was only recently discovered roosting in the towering basalt cliffs of the Coulee. When I heard the volunteer’s report about the low-flying bat, I knew we had a rare opportunity to capture a spotted bat, something few people had done anywhere in the western US.

Our group that night included TNC’s Moses Coulee Program managers, Chuck and Nancy Warner, their assistant Susan Pinkus, biologists from the Bureau of Land Management, and a number of TNC members from Seattle who had traveled across the mountains to North Central Washington to help with this unique citizen science project.

Over the past few years, biologists from state and federal agencies had been trapping bats in the coulee to find out what species lived here. Bat research was still in its infancy in Washington and every night spent trapping bats added new information about the diversity, distribution, and abundance of this little known group of animals. So far we had trapped 13 of Washington’s 15 species and knew that a fourteenth, the spotted bat, was here because we could hear it flying overhead on many nights.

Spotted bats are the only bats in Washington whose echolocation calls can be heard by humans. Echolocation is how bats navigate and find their insect prey in the dead of night. It is so sophisticated that it can be described as seeing with sound. All North American bats use echolocation but at frequencies far above the threshold of human hearing. If you are fortunate to have an electronic gadget called a bat-detector, the night becomes filled with the chirps, smacks, buzzes, and ticks of flying and feeding bats.

Before 1992, no one knew that spotted bats lived in Washington. This puzzled Canadian bat researcher Mike Sarell who had been studying spotted bats in British Columbia 100 miles north of here. Mike knew that spotted bats roosted in tall cliffs in the arid interior of western North America and thought if they were found in British Columbia and in Oregon, they had to live in Washington. Funded by a grant from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Mike began finding spotted bats in suitable habitats from Oroville to Wenatchee. He hit the bat jackpot in Moses Coulee finding more spotted bats than anywhere he’d searched.

Kent Woodruff, a Forest Service biologist, had accidentally captured the first spotted bat in Washington in 2002 while trapping other species of bats in the upper Methow Valley. Catching a spotted bat anywhere in the Western United States and Canada is rare because these bats fly high overhead feeding on night-flying moths, and few biologists have traps that can be lifted high enough to intercept them in flight. But spotted bats have a habit of returning to the same feeding areas where they’ve had hunting success, a behavior call trap-lining. If the low flying bats in Moses Coulee followed this behavior, we had a rare opportunity to capture one of these elusive creatures.

On a warm summer evening in mid August we drove the dusty gravel road toward Jameson Lake and pulled over near where the volunteers heard low-flying bats. Our crew included John Musser, Erik Ellis and me from the BLM and Chuck and Nancy Warner and Susan Pinkus from TNC. After gathering our gear for the night, we hiked cross country through sagebrush toward the sandy wash. This was the hour that rattlesnakes become active so we scanned the path ahead to avoid startling one of these shy reptiles.

“We were optimistic – we figured if there were any bats flying down this wash they could run into one of our nets.” – Neal Hedges

Our first task was to set out a series of five mist nets, the standard bat trap that looks like a volley ball net made with ultra fine thread. John, Erik, and I stretched four nets low across the wash and raised a fifth net above the rest to heighten our reach. After the nets were in place we furled them to avoid catching swallows that still zoomed through the coulee and sat down to await the first bats of the evening. At twilight, western small-footed myotis, the most common bat in the coulee, and western pipistrelles began flitting above us in pursuit of tiny insects. It was time to unfurl the nets and await the arrival of spotted bats.

“The net that actually caught the bat was the northern one that was in the lower part of the draw.” – Chuck Warner

After opening the nets, we moved away from the wash to begin our nighttime vigil. Off to the east a coyote howled and white-throated swifts still chattered at the top of the cliffs. As twilight faded into night, we captured our first bat, a western small-footed myotis that was now enduring the humiliation of being examined and measured. We hadn’t heard the tick of spotted bats and were settling into the bat-catching routine of checking the nets every five minutes to see what we caught. Most bats begin chewing their way out of the netting if left too long and by late summer our nets were tattered with rips and holes made by bats freeing themselves from the unexpected entanglement.

“I remember walking around as they were opening up the nets and being amazed by the size and fragrance of the Indian tobacco plants blooming that night.” – Nancy Warner

As we examined the little myotis, Susan took her turn checking the northern nets. We hadn’t heard a spotted bat yet that night and were startled to hear Susan yell “We’ve got one!” “You’re kidding!” I said, hesitating for a second, but when Susan said again “Yes, we’ve got one!” I tossed the myotis unceremoniously into the air and ran toward the net where we found a bat like no other we’d seen. It had long pale wings, huge pink ears, a jet black back with three snow-white spots, and a chalk-white belly. This was the first spotted bat deliberately caught in Washington but before we could celebrate we had to secure and record our remarkable catch.

“This bat really did look at the people around it more than I’ve seen a lot of other bats.” – Neal Hedges

Susan said later that her first thought had been –don’t do anything to lose this bat! She might have heard that spotted bats do not tangle as badly as most bats and had been seen flying off after hitting a net.

“I’ve seen some people with their newborn children and this was similar.” – John Musser

I quickly but gently held the bat and began to disentangle it from the mesh. Once free from the net I held it for all of us to see. What several of us remembered later was the bat turning its little head to look at each of us huddled around. Its mouth was open but it made no sound and did not struggle or bite the way many bats do. It felt like we were in the presence of a little alien being.

I remember the shock of seeing the big ears and the spots in the net and I couldn’t believe it.” – Susan Pinkus

When we finally settled down to examine the bat, we discovered it was a juvenile female with a wingspan of 15 inches. She was heavier than many species we’d captured but of delicate build. After thorough examination and photos, we released the little female, into the night.

When the excitement of the catch began to settle down and we prepared to gather our gear, we noticed a huge coyote tobacco plant covered with moths within a few feet of the net. We will never know if this was the bait that attracted the young bat, but we like to think it made the difference for us that memorable night in Moses Coulee.

“Every time I hear a spotted bat I try to share the experience with others, to help them connect the sound with the animal – the only bat we can actually hear in our part of the country.” – Erik Ellis

Postscript. Two years later near this same location, a team of graduate students who were using radio telemetry to study the behavior of bats in Moses Coulee, captured a second spotted bat. They let her go without attaching a transmitter.