The unusual mix of plants found in Gearhart’s Butterfield Fen is no accident. It begins with water: falling from clouds and ultimately percolating up through layers of sediment. It took hundreds of years to create the fen. And like everything else in the coastal landscape, it is in constant, slow flux.

Join field ecologist Kathleen Sayce tracking the course of water in the Clatsop Plains—rain, rivers, dune swale lakes, fens, and more—in a presentation titled “Into the Fens: Exploring Clatsop Plains Wetlands” at 6:00pm. on Wednesday, April 20, at Seaside Public Library. It is the fourth program in the 2016 Listening to the Land speaker series, which this year has taken water as its theme. Admission is free; refreshments are served.

When is a bog really a fen? Kathleen will talk about groundwater and what conditions led to development of the particular ecosystem at Gearhart’s Butterfield Fen, with its peat bogs and insectivorous plants. She’ll examine the life cycle of a dune swale lake, and she’ll share what she learned from a year of monitoring groundwater wells on her own property on the Long Beach Peninsula.

Kathleen grew up and continues to live on Willapa Bay and has been active in conservation efforts in southwest Washington all her life. She is a consulting ecologist and educator and has served as science program director for the Willapa Alliance and as chief science officer for ShoreBank Pacific. She has a master’s degree in botany from Washington State University.

Listening to the Land is an annual winter speaker series presented monthly by North Coast Land Conservancy and the Necanicum Watershed Council in partnership with the Seaside Public Library.