Leque Island is a small island located in Snohomish County, in Washington, United States. It can be found just beneath the bridge between Camano Island and Stanwood, at the mouth of the Stillaguamish River, in Puget Sound.
Like the larger Florence Island, Leque is part of the Stillaguamish river delta. The island is formed where the Old Stillaguamish River Channel bifurcates at Leque's Point, with the South Pass flowing into Port Susan and the West Pass emptying into the southern end of Skagit Bay. Leque is separated from Camano to the west by Davis Slough.
Leque Island was originally a salt marsh. After being diked for agricultural purposes, the island was cut off from tidal influence and since then the areas not in use for agriculture have transformed into freshwater wetlands.
History
A large lahar from a Glacier Peak eruption 12,500 years ago created the island and brought most of the alluvial soils.
The land near the island was occupied by local indigenous peoples for millennia before the arrival of white settlers. The local peoples fished and harvested various marine foodstuff from the surrounding waters. Early written accounts describe the island as a place of portage to the Olympic Peninsula, and tell of a local leader known as "Split-Lip Jim" who rented canoes and women to row them.
The first Europeans to arrive in the area, in the early- to mid-1800s, were loggers, who installed a logging mill on Leque Island. An early settler on the island was a Norwegian named O. B. Iverson, who wrote a description of Leque Island and the Stillaguamish River. In the 1870s, he partnered with three other men, his brother-in-law Andy Danielson, Nils Eide, and Nels P. Leque to purchase Leque Island for the purpose of farming. Eide claimed the north end of the island through the Land Act of 1820. The men and their families drained, diked and installed drainage ditches across the island to control flooding. The main crops produced on the island were oats and hay and cattle. These families farmed the land of Leque Island for several generations, eventually selling the parcels off to other farmers. Since 1974, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has purchased of the island and contracted farmers to plant grains for wintering waterfowl.
More recently, Leque Island had suffered repeated levee failures, which endangered the local roadway, Washington State Route 532.
Today the island is a Wildlife Recreation Area, where people come for bird watching, photography, and to hunt ducks, geese and pheasants during hunting season, with the pheasants being stocked on-site.
Hydrology
The Stillaguamish River provides freshwater feed to the island and deposits nutrients and sediment. The groundwater of the island, flowing from east to south, is usually found one foot or less from the surface, with the result that exposed seeps discharge into the man-made drainage ditches.
Flora
The uncultivated parts of the island are mainly covered in an invasive non-native species, such as reed canary grass, holly, Himalayan blackberries, tansy, St Johns wort, oxeye daisies and stinky Bob.
Some common native plants on the island are common rushes, reeds and sedges, cattails and mud disks. Other native plants on the island include yarrow, lady and sword ferns, blue aster, thistles, sweet pea, clovers, rose hips, fireweed, plantain, a stand of dead cottonwoods Populus sect. Aigeiros.
Corn and wheat are also planted on the island by contract farmers. Marine plants in the area are more difficult to ascertain but red kelp, pickleweed and eelgrass have been observed washed up on the beaches of the island and can be assumed to reside in the area.
Fauna
The wildlife on the island itself consists mostly of a large and diverse bird community, including marsh hawks, western sandpipers, loons, seagulls, peregrine falcons, ducks, geese, great blue herons, golden eagles, pheasants (stocked), dunlins, phoebes, least sandpipers, greater yellowlegs (Tringa melanoleuca), black-bellied plovers (Pluvialis squatarola). and short-eared owls. The Audubon Society has identified the area as a major stop on the Pacific Flyway.