Back Story

On July 30, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, signed Executive Order 7681 to create the Turnbull Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, a 23,000-acre, federally protected home for migratory birds and other wildlife in the Channeled Scablands near Cheney. Thirty-seven years later, after energetic lobbying by members of Eastern’s biology faculty, what is today known as the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge also became a home for Eastern faculty and student researchers, as federal officials and the Washington State Legislature agreed to establish EWU’s Turnbull Laboratory for Ecological Studies. Now, after five decades of service, that laboratory is still fulfilling the mission imagined by its founders, serving as a research destination to “further our understanding of the biological processes shaping populations, ecological communities and ecosystems of the Inland Northwest.” Photo: Unidentified students and their instructor at Turnbull, circa 1980. Photo Courtesy of Steve Bingo, JFK Library.