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Important Bird Areas in Washington State

With the assistance of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Audubon began identifying Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Washington in 1998. In June 2001, we published Important Bird Areas of Washington, a 170-page directory describing the first 53 IBAs in our state.

An Important Bird Area is a site, terrestrial or aquatic, that provides essential habitat for one or more species of birds during breeding, wintering, and/or migration. The purpose of Audubon’s IBA program is to identify sites essential to maintaining naturally occurring populations of birds, and to steward those sites for long-term conservation.

As with all IBA programs, Washington’s IBAs were chosen carefully, using standard biological criteria and expert ornithologists’ review.

Bound copies of Important Bird Areas of Washington are available to libraries, educational institutions, scientists, land use planners, land managers, and employees of local, state, and federal land management agencies by request.

Audubon Washington has conducted several additional rounds of IBA identification since the publication of Important Bird Areas of Washington, resulting in a total of 74 IBAs across the state. A searchable database of Washington IBAs is available and includes sites added since the book’s publication. Landowners and managers, planners, and the public can now find information about Important Bird Areas across the country using the IBA Search tool.

Region 1—Introduction, Criteria, Conservation and Pacific Coast (617kb PDF)

Region 2—Western Lowlands (670kb PDF)

Region 3—Cascade Mountains (592kb PDF)

Region 4—Columbia Basin (638KB PDF)

What’s Next?
We are in continuous need of fresh data for our IBAs, and so we strongly encourage monitoring, data collection, and reporting from appropriate places on these landscapes (note that some include private lands where trespassers are not welcomed). Contact Audubon Washington’s Science Coordinator if you’d like to count birds on IBAs. We also need conservation plans developed for almost all of our IBAs, and our IBA Toolkit provides guidelines for that task. If you’d like to get involved in conservation efforts at a Washington IBA, we encourage you to contact the nearest Audubon chapter, or talk with our Science Coordinator about your interest.