Padilla Bay Reserve

NOAA designated Padilla Bay a National Estuarine Research Reserve in 1980. The reserve covers 11,966 acres on the saltwater edge of the Skagit River delta, eight miles long and three miles across. NOAA says it protects one of the largest eelgrass beds in the contiguous United States, nearly 8,000 acres. The Washington Department of Ecology manages the site day to day. NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management provides funding, national guidance, and technical assistance.

Ecology’s Padilla Bay page places the reserve just north of Bay View in Skagit County and calls the meadow the second largest on North America’s Pacific Coast. Eelgrass here is a nursery for juvenile salmon, crab, and herring. NOAA lists herring, smelt, salmon, flatfish, Dungeness crab, ducks, eagles, shorebirds, peregrine falcons, harbor seals, and river otters among the animals the habitats support.

In September 2023, Ecology used a $2,332,854 NOAA award to acquire 74.5 acres of tidal marsh and farmland on Samish Island. NOAA says the purchase is part of a broader effort to restore up to 105 acres of tidal marsh, and that the land sits near a former Samish Indian Nation village. The sources below are NOAA and Washington Department of Ecology pages.