Property added to wetland plan.

Byline: SUSAN PALMER The Register-Guard

It's just a little green swatch in the scheme of things, 75 unobtrusive acres of farmland north of Royal Avenue and east of Green Hill Road.

You hardly notice the grasses swaying in the afternoon breeze as you drive by. You won't see the barn swallows flitting above the grasses or hear the warble of fence-sitting red-winged blackbirds unless you stop the car.

But the small plot bordered by the roads and by the Amazon Diversion Channel and Amazon Creek represents another step toward a vision of connected wetlands that will run from West 18th Avenue all the way out to Fern Ridge Reservoir.

"We've identified quite a bit more acreage to be purchased if we have willing landowners," said Eric Wold, the city's wetlands program supervisor.

"It is a goal of the partnership to work its way to Fern Ridge, along the diversion channel. It's all really focused around facilitating recreation, flood control and water quality."

The partnership - Eugene, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Nature Conservancy - received $500,000 from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, part of the $1.96 million purchase price for land that had been slated to become a residential develop- ment.

The state money - mostly lottery funds - will be matched by $680,000 from the BLM, $530,000 from the North American Wetlands Conservation Act and $250,000 from the city's stormwater management section, said Scott Duckett, the city's wetland and open waters manager.

This purchase follows the January and March acquisitions of almost 79 acres of land west of the new Wal-Mart on West 11th Avenue by the BLM.

Those acres will be added to about 2,500 acres the partnership owns. About half of it is actual wetlands.

Restoring farmland to its former state as wet prairie is no easy task, Wold said.

First, nonnative ryegrass and other grasses, the blackberries and pennyroyal that choke out native species must be removed, he said.

Then reseeding must take place, but indigenous wetland plants - green things that don't mind starting out the season in a pool of water and ending it in the baking heat of rock-hard clay - aren't something you run out and pick up at the local nursery.

Each year, teams of botanists go out to established wetlands and harvest seeds by hand.

Watershed manager Dharmika Henshel spent most of Thursday with four helpers gathering seeds of Lasthenia glaberrima, an uncommon, tiny, daisylike plant that loves wet, sunny, clayey habitat.

The five workers flicked the flower heads, no more than a quarter of an inch across, into small bags for later drying and storing. There are about 95 species of plants that love the wetland world, Henshel said.

"We'll be out here from now to September," gathering seeds, she said.

Some of the wetlands plants are common and easy to identify, such as the waving shafts of tufted hairgrass, the bright blue lupin and the white popcorn flower.

Others, such as Bradshaw's lomatium, are endangered and carefully marked throughout the wetlands by pink flags.

Wet prairie once covered the Willamette Valley, Duckett said. Now about 1 percent of it remains and the west Eugene wetlands represents a key portion.

The marshy land provides important habitat for reptiles such as the western pond turtle and for the Oregon state bird, the western meadowlark, said Pat Johnston, the west Eugene wetlands project manager for the BLM.

The meadowlark, a robin-sized bird with its tan back and yellow chest marked with a black V, used to be common, Johnston said. "Now one of the only places you see it is here."

Building connectivity among the disparate wetlands parcels enhances habitat for the meadowlark, which needs about 400 acres to thrive.

It also aids the population of creatures that don't need that much room by increasing the number of species and improving their genetic diversity, Johnston said.

Fox, beaver and blacktailed deer also find a home in the open space.

But the wetlands aren't just good for plants and nonhumans. People benefit, too.

The trail that skirts the Amazon Diversion Channel running through the wetlands provides plenty of biking and bird-watching opportunities.

And a planned education center would give students more opportunities to learn about the habitat, Johnston said.

More important, the water that flows off Eugene's streets and fertilized lawns gets filtered as it runs through wetlands, Duckett said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers financed a $4.4 million project that pulled down the levies containing the diversion channel south of Royal Avenue two years ago.

Now water floods that area, moving more slowly to Fern Ridge Reservoir.

The heavy metals in it drop out. The plants absorb the nutrients. And the water, which eventually will make its way to the Willamette River via the Long Tom River, is cleaner, Duckett said.

There will always be some kind of work to maintain the health of the wetlands. As the Indians did, wetlands managers do controlled burning to keep woody plants from overtaking herbaceous ones.

Female ash trees are removed to keep the prairie from becoming a forest. And with nonnative species continually migrating, the weeding will never really end.

"In an urban environment, there's always going to be stewardship," Johnston said.