An aerial view of Orcas Island, one of the islands that make up the San Juan Islands in northern Puget Sound. Its coastline is a mix of sandy and rocky beaches and shallow and deep harbours, which provide habitats for a wide variety of plants and animals. Credits – Wikimedia Commons
Despite covering only a small stretch of land near Channel Road, the site supported roughly 80 different species of birds moving through or nesting there across the seasons, an unusually high count for a wetland of its size. Richardson died in 1985, but his work to protect the marsh continued after his death. Richardson found that the marsh supported an unusually high number of bird species. The marsh sat along the Pacific Flyway, the migratory corridor that carries waterfowl and shorebirds up and down the West Coast each year. That helped explain why so many species stopped there. Richardson came to believe that counting birds alone was not enough. He had watched habitats disappear across the region during his academic career, and he concluded that the long-term survival of many species depended on protecting the specific pieces of ground they relied on, not just studying them from a distance. That conviction led him to land conservation work in the San Juan Islands during his final years, applying decades of ornithological training to protect a single marsh. The following year, neighbours Bob and Meg Connor donated a seven-acre conservation easement covering the eastern portion of the wetland, a gift that initiated the effort to establish the Frank Richardson Wildfowl Preserve. A memorial plaque to Richardson now sits on a boulder along Channel Road at the edge of the marsh, marking the spot for visitors who stop to look out over the water.
Colleagues remembered him as a generous mentor, including wildlife artist Tony Angell, who said a chance friendship with Richardson at the Burke Museum shaped his career studying and illustrating Northwest birds, as documented by HistoryLink , the Washington State history resource. Richardson’s influence on Orcas Island extended beyond the marsh itself. Angell later credited those early outings with Richardson, searching for carving stone along the Upper Skagit and examining study skins at the museum, as the spark that led him to a lifetime of wildlife art. Part of its acreage lies in upland forest across the road from the marsh itself, and a short pedestrian path leads visitors up to a screened viewpoint overlooking the water. It is a small piece of ground by conservation standards, but it stands as the direct result of one retired professor’s decision to keep doing fieldwork long after his job ended and of neighbours who chose to protect that work after he was gone.
Today the preserve remains a working wetland rather than a museum piece, still hosting the same seasonal traffic of migrating wildfowl that first caught Richardson’s attention half a century ago.