Marine Life
Quartermaster Harbor hosts the largest spawning population of Pacific herring in south Puget Sound, and is also a major spawning area for surf smelt. The narrow strip of land between the two islands contains a small saltwater marsh. It is part of the Washington State Department of Natural Resources Maury Island Environmental Aquatic Reserve.
Due to the high concentration of forage fish and shellfish, the harbor is a major wintering area for 35 bird species. The most abundant bird is the Western Grebe, which totals eight percent of Washington's wintering population. There are hundreds of scoters and other diving sea ducks that feed on the shellfish during the winter. The grebes, loons, mergansers, diving sea ducks, gulls, and dabbling ducks, in addition to other species, make a total of about 3,000 individual birds wintering there annually.
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Famous quotes containing the words marine and/or life:
“God has a hard-on for a Marine because we kill everything we see. He plays His game, we play ours.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)