Bowerman Basin National Wildlife Refuge
Bowerman Basin is located within the Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge System, established in 1990 and managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It encompasses about 1,500 acres of intertidal mudflats, salt marsh and uplands. In 1996, Grays Harbor Estuary was designated a hemispheric reserve by the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network as a site of international significance.
Bowerman Basin provides essential habitat for a diversity of birds. It hosts approximately 45 percent of the migrating shorebirds in Grays Harbor, which is one of four estuaries in North America that supports more than one million shorebirds during migration. Bowerman Basin is home to shorebirds year-round, but is a critically important staging site during spring migration. The basin is listed by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife as priority wintering habitat for Peregrine Falcons.
