Backard Wildlife Sanctuary Manager Gerry Krueger enjoys her 12-year-old forest

Wheatfield returned to forest draws wildlife

Elk, deer, raccoons, skunks, turkeys, songbirds, and other wildlife are making themselves at home on Gerry and Ron Kruegers’ property in Spokane County where what was once a wheatfield is now a forest.

“Of all the things I’ve done in my life, “ says Gerry, “this is the best.”

That’s quite a testimonial for a charter member of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) Backyard Wildlife Sanctuary program who created the “Open Yard/Bird Fair” event to promote the program, hosted it for nine consecutive years, and reached nearly 12,000 persons with her sustainable wildlife gardening message.

While running a small home nursery of old-fashioned (non-hybrid) roses and drought-tolerant and native plants for birds in her retirement, Gerry turned the couple of acres directly around their home into a colorful wildlife haven. The Kruegers were among the first to enroll their property in the Backyard program in 1988 when WDFW expanded it to the Spokane area after its 1986 start in Seattle.

Knowing that “seeing is believing,” in 1991 Gerry and Ron offered to open their place for a weekend of public tours to show others how to provide habitat for wildlife at home with minimal watering and maintenance. In the first year, nearly 1,000 attended, and for each of the next eight years about 1,300 flocked to the Pleasant Prairie property to learn from the Kruegers’ experience. With many native plants not available then in conventional nurseries, Gerry’s “Blossoms and Bloomers” operation provided the start for thousands more wildlife gardens throughout northeast Washington.

The 18-acre balance of the Kruegers’ property was in wheat, like much of the surrounding area. Gerry knew she couldn’t afford to restore those 18 acres to native vegetation on her own, so the former teacher/librarian started cracking the books and knocking on doors.

She found a “carbon offset” program (now Carbonfund.org) that funds reforestation projects to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning that contributes to global warming. Besides restoring watersheds and wildlife habitat, forests capture carbon dioxide and store it in the trees’ mass and in the soil.

Gerry also found Steve Sprecher, a Spokane-based soil conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), who was willing to help her wade through the carbon offset funding application paperwork to secure a grant.

Students plant trees in Kruegers’ wheatfield in April 1995

By spring of 1995, more than 5,000 six-inch tree seedlings, 2,000 shrub starts, and hundreds of pounds of native grass seed were available for planting on the old wheatfield. Gerry and Steve rounded up student volunteers from local schools to get the stems in the ground and spread the seed.

Most of the trees planted were Ponderosa pine, native to the area and notoriously tough. Also planted were Douglas fir, tamarack, bird cherry trees, elderberry, snowberry, wild rose, Siberian pea shrub, and bunchgrasses.

The first three springs were fortunately wet, Gerry recalls, and the forest took off. The area has never received any supplemental watering and the only fertilizer was in the original mesh rodent-guards placed around each planted stem.

Earlier this summer, a dozen years after the planting, Steve visited the Kruegers’ forest and estimated that amazingly almost 85 percent of the plantings had not only survived, but thrived. Many of the pines are 20 feet or taller and other trees are 15-footers.

“Steve had said when we planted that we could expect 12 to 18 inches of growth a year,” Gerry recalls, “and we got that and more.”

The only species that didn’t do well were bird cherry trees, which Gerry notes are prolific in the garden around the house.

“Maybe they just don’t like the P-pines,” she said.

Gerry and Ron maintain a mile-long trail through their new forest and Gerry walks it every day to enjoy the trees and the wildlife they draw. Although the landscape around their house has long hosted a variety of birds and other wildlife, she says the forest has drawn some newcomers.

“We have both black-capped and mountain chickadees and wild turkeys now,” she said. “A small herd of elk, 12 to 18, are here in the winter. And we never saw raccoons or skunks before the forest.”

In another dozen years or so the 18-acre stand will likely need some thinning. But beyond that, the Kruegers plan to protect the forest as long as they can. In 1995 when the project started, they secured an 80-year covenant to do just that, and were honored by WDFW for lifetime stewardship of wildlife habitat.