Mike and I love to find great places to have lunch, and we really love to eat by the water. Mike found us this fantastic park that is so interesting that we had to spend a couple of days here.
Bay View State Park in on the Padilla Bay which is an estuary in the Washington Puget Sound.
The bay is filled with sediment from the Skagit River and the bottom is very shallow, flat, and muddy. It is so shallow that almost the whole bay is intertidal. This means it is flooded at high tide but when the tide goes out, the whole bay empties, exposing miles of mud flats.
Eelgrass is valuable because it is habitat for wildlife and commercially-harvested animals. Eelgrass is used as a nursery by salmon, crab, perch, and herring. Eelgrass is also home for millions of worms, shrimp, clams, and other invertebrates that are food for great blue herons, eagles, otters, seals, as well as humans. In addition, these vast eelgrass meadows trap carbon in the mudflats, which keeps it from becoming greenhouse gases.
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