Nearly 30 years ago, I was sitting on scaffolding that lay between two A-framed platforms and adjacent to the water line of a 30 foot long 1940s era wooden Alaskan fishing boat on the “ways” at Port Bailey Cannery on Kodiak Island.  The “ways” or slipways is a launching ramp on railway wheels that pulls boats onshore by a large cable from a power winch.  For much of their history, many fishing boat ways in Alaska were powered by steam engines.  I found one derelict engine in the wreck of an old cannery near the Naknek River on the shores of Bristol Bay among a scattering of discarded sailing fishing boats. The massive engine filled a moderate-sized building and smelled of grease and bird droppings. The 20 foot derelict fishing boats were remnants of a fleet of 50 year- old, sailing wooden craft that had been jury-rigged with make-shift engines after powered boats were allowed in the Bristol Bay fishery in 1951. 

I sat on the boards holding a wooden caulking mallet trying to pound strands of cotton into the seams of the planks of the boat. The cotton came in long continuous strands from a bundle that lay next to me.  I looped the cotton with the iron at the edge of the seam before setting it into the plank seams with a wedged-shaped caulking iron (called a “making iron”) in a series of rhythmic strokes from my mallet.  For larger boats, the cotton would be topped by strands of fibrous oakum (composed of hemp soaked in linseed oil and pine tar) that also was pounded into the seams with another, more blunt-edged, wedging iron (called a “hardening iron”). When the boat was returned to the water, the wooden planks swelled and the cotton sealed the seams. The oakum prevented the cotton from rotting and helped keep it in place.  It would have been a fine day because I was alone on a beach in Alaska that overlooked the vast Gulf of Alaska on a clear cold mid-May morning, except a blustery wind kept grabbing the loose cotton strands, pulling them out of the seams before I could end my full caulking run.  Also my head hurt. The day before, while drilling a 3 inch hole in the side of another boat, a chunk of my shoulder- length hair became entangled in the drill chuck and was ripped out leaving a small, but embarrassing bald patch on the back of my head. 

Alitak Bay, Kodiak Island

The 1982 season was my first of four in Alaska.  I loved working by myself on 40 year-old wooden fishing boats that had pulled many thousands of salmon from the rich Alaskan waters.  A few days before, an Arctic fox had been trotting between the boats, foraging for snacks and briefly glanced up at me while I fitted a new plank into the side of a boat.  Sea otters occasionally swam by looking for shellfish and once a pod of killer whales swam into the bay of the cannery and lazily careened around the dock pilings as the cannery workers piled out of the buildings rushing to get a glimpse of these beautiful predators.  The canneries still had small fleets of old wooden fishing boats that they lent to fisherman as long as they sold their catch to the cannery at a price perhaps lower than offered by others.  As a shipwright, my responsibility was to repair the boats if needed.  We (the shipwrights) were occasionally called out in the middle of the night for emergency repairs because the fishing seasons were very short.  I remember one stormy night we pulled a boat onto the ways.  It was a very short opening, perhaps no more than three days allowed for fishing, and the skipper of the boat was frantic to get his boat back into the water.  As the boat rested on the ways, water erupted out of the plank seams.  I stuffed cotton as quickly and thickly as possible into the seams with my mallet and iron, but could feel that the fastenings holding the planks were weak, and the seams would not likely stay sealed because of the movement of the loose planks.  I promised nothing to the fisherman as he peered down from the boat railing with a look of desperation.  This boat was his third, the other two having foundered during other stormy nights in the Gulf of Alaska. 

Michael replacing plank on fishing boat , Port Bailey

My third season, I worked at a cannery on the mouth of the Naknek River in Bristol Bay and spent part of the time repairing the planks on an 80 foot slab-sided fishing scow.  I also repaired some of the brightly painted purple, red and garish blue fishing boats owned by first and second generation Italian fishermen who immigrated to southern California and were under contract to fish for the cannery. They arrived with great fanfare every year cooking pasta and canned tuna in their bunkhouse rooms on hot plates and offering bribes of fish to the shipwrights so their boats would get repaired first.  They often gathered in groups intently watching us work and argue loudly among themselves about how we should be doing our jobs.  Back to the fishing scow- the original planks were 6 inches thick and 12 inches wide with some over 50 feet in length.  The wood was cut in sawmills from old growth fir trees harvested and milled somewhere near Astoria during the 1940s when the city still hummed with 35 or so canneries processing thousands of salmon pulled from the Pacific,  the Columbia River and its tributaries.  We were replacing the planks with wood also milled in Astoria and harvested from the few remaining old growth stands in the Coast Range.  The foreman kept shaking his head mumbling that “using clear, tight- grained fir meant for furniture showrooms as planking for a 50 year old fish scow was shameful waste”.  To cut them to fit, three shipwrights held the long planks as I guided them through a massive 9 foot tall ship’s band-saw that contained a three inch wide blade.  The bearings in this giant saw were recently replaced and the motor rebuilt.  However, the RPMs, for some reason, were set for 2- times their normal speed so when we first turned on the saw the huge wheels and blade started rotating at an impossible speed with the bearings emitting a jet engine-like roar.  The shipwrights and millwrights in the shop stopped their work and stared briefly with open mouths at the saw and then everyone scrambled for the doors fearing that the room would soon fill with dozens of lethal bearings thrown from the wheels of the saw.  Some of the older shipwrights had worked in their youth on the majestic “windjammer” ships that still occasionally made sailing runs carrying lumber and grain between the Americas and other ports of call in the 1930s.  They mentioned massive planks carved out of huge timbers, steamed to fit and jacked into the hull of the ship.  After cutting and fitting, the heavy planks were steamed for hours to make them more malleable and rushed to the sides of the ship carried by 8 men running in tandem.

Michael, center, with shipwrights repairing fish scow at Naknek

Looking down the beach one mid-spring afternoon while working on the ways, I noticed a pair of ravens flying parallel to each other and the rim of 30 foot high cliffs that bordered the beach.  The male would periodically fold his wings against his body, turn belly up and drop like a stone for a few feet before recovering to continue his steady flight.  This mating ritual was repeated most of the late afternoon, until a rustling of some alder branches along the edge of the cliff drew my attention.   A young and apparently very hungry brown bear erupted out of the bushes, slapping branches and frantically slashing at the ravens with his paws.  I wasn’t sure if his futile attempts at catching these very smart birds were out of a desperate hunger or an aggressive, in-your-face exuberance from a young bear just out of his long winter hibernation.  On Kodiak Island after work, I would often walk in the tundra and hills surrounding these desolate canneries.  Small lakes dotted the landscape surrounded by wild iris.  I never came face-to-face with these largest of bears, but my friend Dan seemed to stumble upon angry sows with cubs throughout the summer.  He vowed not to venture more than a few yards from the cannery after a particularly close visit with an aggressive female on a narrow ocean-spit near Akhiok .  His mis-fortune continued when he spooked two young bear cubs near his bunkhouse and heard their mother bark a sharp warning somewhere nearby.  At Naknek, one night some bears broke into the salmon egg-processing house and, like a band of thirsty sailors in a fully-stocked bar,   consumed a fortune in salmon roe.  During one evening walk, I pushed my way through some thick alders to the beautiful shoreline of a lake a few miles from Port Bailey and almost stepped on a large 8 inch- high by 20 inch-wide pile of steaming brown bear dung.  Most of us that spend our free time roaming through nature, rarely think about encounters with large predators, but for once, my heart started racing and the hairs on the back of my neck rose and I probably experienced a sensation that pre-historic hunter/gatherers had every day as they roamed the forests and valleys in search of food.  I decided to leave the lake and head home to the safety of old wooden boats and a warm bunkhouse.

Port Bailey, Kodiak Island

We recently spent a few gorgeous days in New York City, replete with its inimical street scenes, restaurants, and museums. Among other invaluable lessons, I learned that if you know ahead of time the price of a NYC latté, you will not enjoy sipping one. When we left, our camas were just beginning to send up their flower stalks. The flash-in-the-pan interlopers– tulips and daffodils— had already coloured the margins of our perennial beds and were in decline. Now was the time of the undisputed queen of the western Cascades. Early settler’s descriptions of the Willamette Valley vibrate with accounts of deep purple vistas—hundreds of acres of camas. That was then, this is now, and we have so few in our field that I know them individually, and each year flag their locations so I can return in August to harvest the seeds. So far I’ve had mixed success propagating them but this spring when I complained to Frank Morton, one of the valley’s liveliest seed gurus, he told me about stratification and temperature gradients and all manner of scientific stuff. Next year’s plantings should be a resounding success; think of Yeats’ Innisfree  where noon is a purple glow (it only works if you substitute our frog-loud field for his bee-loud glade).

Camas in flower

So away we flew to Gotham with camas in mind. Early one morning our son Martin and I took the fast and pricey elevator to the Top of the Rock—70 floors on the Rockefeller Center’s GE building. There are, I learned, elevator junkies (and not just in New York) and this ride in particular—with its glass ceiling and little blue lights dotting the track—is iconic. The announcement that this Schindler High Speed Elevator moves upwards at a whopping 18 mph draws gasps (that’s only a little faster than my old tractor, which never draws gasps)—but the trip is nonetheless eye-catching: falling up the rabbit hole. Apparently the same elevator in the Sears Tower in Chicago goes 20mph. I don’t know if it has little blue lights and a glass ceiling. Someone can check, I’m sure.

Looking north from the outside observation deck you see spread out before you all of Central Park—a brilliant vista (no fields of camas, naturally). Glass and steel all around, rivers bordering in the distance, the park is the heart of Manhattan. And it’s big, even where scale is skewed by buildings 800 feet tall and higher. Helicopters buzzed below like dragonflies. All the little lakes, baseball diamonds, rocky outcrops, winding paths—layed out like a map.  From our perspective we couldn’t  see the snapping turtles or the catfish or the insect larvae just emerging into phase two of their unobserved lives at the edges of the pools. And we couldn’t hear the busking bands—high-school a capella choirs, flamenco guitarists, tuba quartets (probably elevator junkies at night) but the park, even from our perspective, was definitely and unmistakably alive. After breakfast we took a bus to the north end and walked through its 843 acres down to Columbus Circle. That’s a pretty good-sized chunk of land, about a third again the size of Bald Hill Farm (my standard reference point these days for acreage). And I learned more facts.  Central Park’s 24,000 trees, while not actually numbered individually, are routinely surveyed (which must take a considerable bite out of the annual $42 million budget), its waterways are monitored for algal blooms (little signs crop up like daisies here and there telling you things like this), and the 9000 benches are serviced according to a fairly tight schedule by what appears to be a tribe of park employees ranging from teenaged offenders working off their public service sentences to elderly repositories of lore gleaned from decades of handling tricky questions –“Are worms wild animals?” (I think the answer was ‘yes but they are not fierce’ but I may have misheard). This tribe also totes away the five million pounds of rubbish each year, fishes pennies, cigarette butts and Coke cans from the four dozen fountains, and leads daily ornithological tours. It’s an urban space, after all. Twenty five million people visit the park every year, not all of them treading lightly. Soil compaction is an issue.

Central Park from the top of the Rockefeller

And yet it is still the natural home (however temporary) to flocks of migrating songbirds so large they show up on the radar screens at JFK airport. We caught a glimpse of Pale Male, the celebrated red-tailed hawk that nests high up on a window ledge outside the president of New York University’s office and whose nearly fledged offspring have their own web-cam. Bedrock scraped clean by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet pokes through the grass in dozens of outcrops (“No, Park Officials do not arrange the rocks—they come this way”. . . .  it seems the park has to remind its visitors that not all environments are man-made) and sparrows watch for picnic leavings from an enormous Robert Burns  erected along the Literary Walk (an equally imposing Shakespeare is not far away—he recently underwent a hot-waxing to remove what sparrows leave behind). The park itself is, in many ways, a living memorial for the poet William Cullen Bryant, one of its most significant supporters and the only one who actually died there; he’s officially memorialized by a monument in a nearby park that bears his name beside the New York Public Library. Early in the city’s development Bryant saw the connection between our mortal destiny and the quickly disappearing open spaces— “TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language. . .” and lobbied hard for the preservation of a generous parcel in the city’s core.

Burns, for various reasons, would have preferred the pub to either park or library.

The effect of this blend is both inspiring and unsettling—after all, there’s a good deal of somewhat unregulated ‘nature’ happening in the margins—in the ponds, along the walkways, in those places allowed it  (no nesting on the monuments, please). Yet the park is not and cannot be, after all, authentically natural, no more than a zoo can provide natural habitat for its residents. It illustrates the bare fact that ultimately we’re given a choice. Here along the Willamette we still have, within reach nearly everywhere we look, an opportunity to avoid reducing our natural lands to mere parks. If we allow a wiser and less invasive dynamic to dictate the terms of engagement with our environment, we may be able to honour Yeats’ closing observation in Innisfree: “ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on pavements grey,/ I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”   If we fail to bring this about, if we decline this option and relegate natural rhythms to memory, one by one the species depending on our answer will vanish, taking their music with them. For 42 million dollars annually, Manhattanites don’t get nearly as much for their money as it first appears (tuba quartets and fountains notwithstanding). And not nearly as much, dollar for dollar, as we can reap along the Willamette.

I left Corvallis the next day, drove across Willamette Pass and through the beautiful Sprague River Basin until I nearly reached Lakeview where I turned southeast for a long drive across a vast high desert landscape to the Nevada border.  My first stop was the Sheldon National Antelope Refuge.  I was spending 3 days trapping greater sage-grouse on the Refuge to take blood samples and continue a banding study that began in the late 1980s.  Wildlife research, the previous year, had found some alarming problems in greater sage-grouse populations in areas in Montana and Wyoming.  A number of birds were testing positive (from blood samples) for markers that suggested they were exposed to West Nile virus and populations of greater sage- grouse seemed to be plummeting in parts of their range because of mortalities linked to this mosquito-borne pathogen.  So the USFWS biologists were testing birds across their range to determine if they contained these markers.  Historically the basin and range of Washington and Oregon contained vast numbers greater sage-grouse.  This keystone sagebrush/steppe obligate was being considered for federal listing because their populations had fallen by 90% since the days when Meriwether Lewis described them as the “Cock of the Plains” during his journey through the Columbia Basin. 

Sage grouse at Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge

I met with Mike and other volunteers at one of the Sheldon bunkhouses.   Mike is a USFWS biologist who has studied greater sage-grouse for 18 years and was an expert trapper of these magnificent creatures.  Sage grouse are a lek-forming species.  In other words, during breeding season (March-April) males gather at traditional breeding sites (leks) and compete for females by elaborate displays.  The higher ranking or alpha males breed with the most females.   Displays occur during a short 2-4 week period and occur mostly during the day, but occasionally you can hear strutting males during moonless nights.  The strutting displays by individual males last about 2 seconds but are very complex.  Paul Johnsgaard described the sequence: “the start of strutting is marked by a rapid wing-swish and vertical upward jerk of the head that lasts about .2 second.  There is then a pause, as the esophageal pouch is inflated and two bare, breast-like areas of the frontal, olive-colored skin are partly and briefly exposed.  Simultaneously with the wing-swish noise is a low-pitched growl, apparently produced by feather noise.  After a slight pause there is a second wing-swish, accompanied by a second vertical head jerk and greater esophageal expansion, that produces a second brief but silent exposure of the bare skin patches.  At this point the male utters a quick series of three low-pitched cooing or hooting notes.  There is then a hollow plopping sound as the now fully expanded and orange-shaped air-sacs are deflated….and followed by a sharp whistle and second extremely rapid air sac inflation and deflation plop.”   As the males display, the females are outside the circle appraising their performances.  The displays at night are the best time to capture the birds because both sexes are aggregated in one area.  Spotlights are used to transfix the birds until a pole net can be dropped over them.  Many lek sites have been occupied by multiple generations of sage grouse and have been monitored by biologists for decades.  Scientist are not all that clear on what constitutes a good lek site over a not-so-good site but generally they are knolls or exposed areas that are free from snow. 

Greater Sage Grouse on Lek. A Greater Sage-grouse male displays for a female.

We left the bunkhouse at 9:00 pm and started our walk through the sage brush.  We had divided into two teams of three with each team having a spot-lighter in the center between two netters. The spotlights are powered by backpack generators that emit a steady loud hum and thin clouds of gas exhaust.  Mike with his spotlight has the ability to pick out the eye shine or head shapes of sage grouse without hesitation several hundred feet away.  I am focused mostly on not tripping over sage brush or stepping into holes.  It is still mostly winter in the high desert.  The temperature hovers near 19 degrees and I have many layers of cloths and a bright headlamp.  Snow falls intermittently but does not seem to detract from Mike’s amazing ability to find birds.   When he spots a grouse he immediately picks up his pace keeping the strong spotlight on the bird as he hustles towards it.  As he nears the bird he makes the light flutter rapidly on the grouse and motions one of the netters to approach.  I stumble forward and drop the pole net quickly on the bird and then immediately leap forward to grasp it under the net scraping my knees.  Lewis’s “Cock of the Plain” is a large and powerful bird with males exceeding 6 lbs and having a wing span of 3 feet or more.  The bird in my net is a male in full breeding plumage with erect filoplumes (display feathers) arising from the back of his head, a deep black throat, pure white breast, and beautiful black underbelly.  I reach under the net and grasp the back of the struggling grouse with both hands holding the wings against his sides and turn him over on his back in my lap.   Sage grouse become very passive on their backs and are easily handled in that posture.  I check his legs for any previous leg bands.  Mike continues after another bird.  I sit quietly with the grouse who occasionally emits a deep canine-like growl.  It is good to be away from the noise of the generator.  I gently speak in a low voice to reassure it or me and glance up at a clearing sky that is covered with vast numbers of stars.  Mike returns and he draws blood from a wing vein and inserts a band on its right leg.  We also examine its primary and secondary feathers to determine if it is a full adult or juvenile.  I turn the bird over and carefully released it into a clump of nearby sage brush. The trapping continues until the sun begins to emerge in the eastern sky.  We have two more nights to get as many blood samples as possible for the West Nile tests. On the last night, Mike steps into a kit fox hole and breaks his right leg. 

Now back to the pink hair.  I did not mention my hair color during the trapping or subsequent meeting with the Chukar Foundation.  I thought, that unless asked, I would not volunteer that I had been throwing perfumed powders on people in a rain storm while celebrating a Hindu festival in Corvallis.  Sometime later, I asked Mike if he remembered the trapping excursion and my pink hair.  He said that some of the folks had winked and nodded but otherwise they thought it best not to mention the hair.  The American West is known for its eccentricities and most folks deeply respect the privacy of others including those with pink hair.  I will forever remember sitting in the high desert on a cold early spring day under a nighttime galaxy of stars cradling growling sage grouse forgetting pink hair and sore knees.    

Pronghorns at Sheldon NWR

 “There was a tall slough grass
Too tough for the farmers to feed the cattle,
And the wind was sifting through, shaking the grass;
Each spear of grass interfered a little with the wind
And the interference sent up a soft hiss,
A mysterious little fiddler’s and whistler’s hiss,
And it happened all the spears together
Made a soft music in the slough grass
Too tough for the farmers to cut for fodder.
”This is a proud place to come to
On a winter morning, early in winter,”
Said a hungry man, speaking to his dog,
Speaking to himself and the passing wind,
“This is a proud place to come to.”

 The mid-Willamette Valley—our proud place—is not blessed with inattention from the whirling world, from those who live elsewhere but want this where to augment their bank accounts. Ten years here can render once familiar sights unrecognizable, relegating them to the preserve of memory. Once converted, such lands rarely return to their former states.  Yet we have just as many natural allies as we do threats—we’re rich in farmers, ranchers and orchardists, men and women who know first hand that the true test of a land’s vitality is its ability to regenerate itself and who live on the land whose fate they control. Their support—just as much as those who live along paved and lighted streets—will make or break our efforts at ensuring that our rivers and streams, our uplands and savannas, remain capable of self-renewal. Over a decade ago the Catholic bishops of the Columbia watershed wrote in their pastoral letter that “[t]he means are now available to use regional resources more efficiently while doing much less harm to regional ecologies.”  They also pointed out that the courage and resilience necessary to cultivate this watershed over a century ago are now required to navigate the challenges of living in closer harmony with it.

How does that work, exactly? There isn’t a one size fits all model —each property, each landowner, each dialogue is different. While the broader goal remains the same—to enhance and, where necessary, restore the network of waterways  and adjacent lands to the point where they are self-regenerating in a meaningful way– the solutions will require finesse, time and trust. Courtney White (from Quivira) lays out in “The Working Wilderness: A call for a Land Health Movement” one prospect—but one drawn from high-range grazing on semi-arid land. Definitely, not us—especially the semi-arid part; I’m looking at frog-ponds in my lawn as I write and I suspect our lambs are evolving into a semi-aquatic subspecies.  But the salient features of the dialogue he recounts ring true: landowners are our natural partners because they understand stewardship—our interests coincide or can easily be adjusted to overlap. Stewardship is polyvalent–everyone knows you can’t take care of the land without taking care of those who live on it. In one sense, we all live on the land—let’s make sure this is true in every sense. Once upon a time we didn’t need to ask whether the land also lives off us. A glance at the state of the Willamette and its tributaries confirms that those days are demonstrably past.  Our fates are now intimately intertwined– in this dance, the music will play only as long as we dance together.

Harriet the Tortoise

Tui Malila, a radiated Madagascar tortoise, was apparently 188 when he/she died in 1965. Tui Malila was collected by Captain Cook in the 1770s and given to the royal family of Tonga. Adwaita, a male Aldabra giant tortoise, was a pet of General Robert Clive in India during the 1750s and died in 2006 at the age of 255 (or so).  He was a young tortoise of 32 years when the Treaty of Paris, that ended the American Revolution, was signed and over 80 when Harriet was stowed away on a British sailing ship visiting the Galapagos Islands. The giant tortoises mentioned above are monuments to an astonishing range of human history including Oregon’s early settlement history.  In 1835 when Harriet was taken from her Galapagos rocks, the Willamette Valley was entering into the very early history of Euro-American settlement with retired French Canadian trappers (Metis) and their native-American wives establishing small agricultural communities in the Valley.   

However, human history in Oregon stretches considerably beyond the life span of ancient tortoises. While excavating Fort Rock Cave in 1936, an archaeologist, Luther Cressman, found dozens of sandals that were crafted 9-10,000 years ago. The sandals were made of sagebrush bark fiber and finely crafted to fit individual feet, with flat close-twined soles composed of fine warps and ankle ropes.  Tom Connolly of the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History said that the sandals are “traces of human lives, with worn heel pockets, charred pinpricks on the toe flaps (from feet warming too close to a fire?)….an assemblage of sandals here, those big and worn, small and child-size, those caked in mud.”  The illuminations of these intimate details remind me of the 35,000 year old hand print found in the Chauvet Cave in France with the distinctive crooked middle finger and the child’s footprint dating from 27,000 years ago also found in the Chauvet cave and perhaps imprinted on the floor just prior to a landslide that covered the entrance of the cave for 27 millennia until re-discovered in 1994.  

Sagebrush bark sandals from Fort Rock Cave

Given the Willamette Valley’s 10,000 year history of human occupation it is common to become engaged with parts of that history.  Once while walking along the edge of a marsh with Dr. Dave Brauner (an OSU archaeologist) on a bluff property (at the confluence of the Santiam, Luckiamute and Willamette Rivers) I almost stepped on a small stone projectile point embedded in the bashaw clay soils that compose this wetland. I crouched to peer at the fine fluted edges and imagined an ancient hunter stalking the marsh for waterfowl or shorebirds.  Dave suggested that the point was 1500 years old.   It is also common to encounter living relics of great age in the Willamette Valley.  The Valley of the Giants near Fall City is a legacy of once dominant ancient Douglas-fir forests that covered the Coast Range of western Oregon.  I remember walking through this 40 ac ancient forest and touching 600 year giant fir trees that were young saplings when Henry V’s Welsh and English archers decimated the French nobility with their yew long bows at the battle of Agincourt. 

While mucking about Owens Farm, I stopped to count the rings of a massive Oregon oak tree that had fallen and someone had cut in-half.  I stopped at 250 rings and thought about how this tree lived through the entire industrial age and was a mature oak when Lewis and Clark’s company paddled down the Columbia River. When I walk under the massive spreading branches of 400 year old white oaks still scattered across the Willamette Valley, I am in awe of their ancient age and the events that they witnessed. The Valley is rich with human histories.  Every time you walk along a pathway, you are connecting to the stories of those many hundreds of generations of humans who left their footprints embedded in the soils of the Willamette Valley.

- Michael Pope

Owens Farm

"Van Leeuwenhoek In His Shop". Artist unknown (www.vanleeuwenhoek.com)

Other early explorers had seen the miniature beauties of the microscopic world—and their astonishment is equally breathless, as if they had stumbled upon an ancient buried Louvre filled with unseen masterpieces that put to shame our own efforts at symmetry and beauty. Here’s John Wilkins, the bishop of Chester in the 1660s, enthusing over Robert Hooke’s engravings in his recently published Micrographia:  “Whatever is Natural doth by [the microscope] appear, adorned with all imaginable Elegance and Beauty. There are such inimitable gildings and embroideries in the smallest seeds of Plants, but especially in the parts of Animals. In the head or eye of a small Fly: such accurate order and symmetry in the frame of the most minute creatures, a Lowse or a Mite, as no man were able to conceive without seeing them. Whereas the most curious works of Art, the most accurate engravings or embossments, seem such rude bungling deformed works as if they had been done with a Mattock or Trowel.”

What van Leeuwenhoek saw was a game changer—it meant that not only was pond and ditch water teeming with previously unseen creatures, so was our saliva, our milk, virtually every liquid he could sample.  Far from static, water was absolutely vibrant. It was as if an entire parallel universe was living among us unseen and until now undetectable. Suddenly, in an afternoon, water was no longer merely a facilitator of life, but living.  The world had shifted.

But not for long. It’s hardly the first indicator that we as a species have a collective version of ADD; wonder fades, and water is once again mundane, something to be managed, like tooth decay and public debt—and we lose when we see it primarily as a means to generate power or keep our cars shiny.

Naturally, everyone knows that each drop of the Willamette, the Mary’s, even that stuff in our gutters where the leaves collect too far back to reach is a virtual condo in a vast and intimately linked metropolis. Yet somehow those gorgeous little creatures whose very existence set Europe on fire are now relegated to 9^th grade biology class where they excite first time visitors for a week or month before something else captures the attention. They’ve become mere footnotes, buried along with their enormous amorphous culture in pipes, and relegated to drainage ditches, garden hoses, and underground sewers. As a culture, we hate getting our feet muddy, or even wet. Who knows what price we pay for this.

Inundated Fields along the Willamette River

Yet that unseen world is still magic. Just add water to whatever piece of land you can imagine and see what happens. When we bulldozed part of our field into a seasonal wetland, careful not to disturb the creek. The resulting pool, at its deepest around 5 feet in high water times, bends around an island, and captures overland flow from the rest of the fields surrounding us. Honestly, the whole area yearns to be a wetland—there is standing water everywhere. But the basin we sculpted offers water a proper chance to show what it can do.  Popcorn flowers, dormant for years, bloom along the margins. Some birds brought cattails, others willow and alder and now a thicket curves along the berm, soft with catkins. This time of year, the pond becomes a concert hall. We have a vigorous red-wing blackbird section whose sonatas transport even casual listeners. And at dusk the frog chorus (those little Pacific Tree Frogs) starts—by the time all the performers are warmed up you start hearing overtones and harmonies. It’s loud even with the windows closed, but better with them open.  Water music indeed. By late April, choreographers arrive: the strings of translucent eggs open, sending tadpoles out into the water plantain, and salamanders in the pennyroyal. Heron hunch in the shallows, brooding. The cast changes as summer comes down and the crown sparrows and swallows take over from the frogs. Before water built our opera house, all you could hear was traffic on Philomath Boulevard nearly a mile away.

Recently a team of researchers discovered large populations of juvenile fish in those shallow ditches and streams that flow around and across grass-seed fields. (See Video Below)

A true Van Leeuweenhoek moment—fish living in little streams that flood across low lying fields. Seems they’ve been there all along. This valley tries hard to revert to type, and repays even token visiting rights generously: keep the ditches and creek clear, leave a few trees over the edges, and everyone is happier. Even better, reintroduce water to those riparian lands long deprived (through benign or active neglect) and watch the transformation. You don’t need a ship full of pepper to grow rich these days. Just add water.

Photo Courtesy: Wildlife Services Arizona

Beaver are culturally significant to native Americans.  They often appear in stories and images, and were widely recognized as “creators”.  With their great energy, diligence and engineering skills, they build rich and diverse habitats for plants and animals.  Euro-American traders sailed along the coast of Oregon in the mid-18^th century and traded for sea otters skins.  Beaver pelts were also traded, but to a lesser extent until the Hudson Bay Company and rivals (Pacific Fur and North West Company) arrived in the early 1800s and established rough outposts in the Pacific Northwest.  To reduce competition from other companies, The Hudson Bay Company developed a policy of fur “desertification” whereby beaver in the Snake River Country would be removed to prevent American fur trappers from entering the Pacific Northwest.  Nearly 35,000 beaver were trapped over six years in this buffer zone.  Ultimately this keystone ecological species was nearly exterminated from much of the Snake River Country (and Oregon) and the vast benefits that they provided to the aquatic and riparian systems ceased.  The health of many streams and rivers suffered as a consequence.  Jennifer Ott provides a great narrative of this history in her article “Ruining the Rivers in the Snake River.”  She suggested aside from the ecological consequences that the “fur desert policy is not the story of the Snake River Basin but is one part of a larger history that includes innumerable human-nature interactions that have shaped and reshaped the place in which people live.”  Müller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun in their book  “The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetland Engineer”  state that “no other wild animal has shaped North American history as much as beaver…..The fur trade painted the map of North America’s interior and paved the way for European settlement, the founding of empires, and the destruction of indigenous cultures.”  The disappearance of Atlantic and Pacific salmon and large carnivores like wolves  in many areas is a similar story of extirpation and loss, and is a remarkable example of history repeating itself as humans reshaped the environment (through time) in different geographic settings.

In the first half of the 20^th century, state wildlife managers seemed to clearly understand that the loss of beaver had seriously degraded many aquatic systems that benefit fish and wildlife.  The response to our impacts on nature is often a story of trying to fix what is broken with expensive and sometimes odd remedies.  Elmo W. Heter in 1950 published an article in the Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM) about a project that parachuted beavers into remote areas of Idaho to re-establish populations.  They tested the methodology on a male, named Geronimo, with numerous parachuting trials. Eventually he was dropped into some remote mountain valley with numerous females.  Beaver have returned to many areas, but not without controversy.  Beavers are inherently wetland engineers that backup water.  A consequence may be a wetland that provides rich habitats for birds, amphibians and fish, or plugged culverts, flooded roads, girdled or down trees and frowning landowners.  The Oregon State Department of Agriculture list them as a “predatory animal” (like rabbits, rodents, and feral swine) on private lands. They can be killed without a permit or provocation by a landowner.  On public lands they are managed as a “protected furbearer” that can, under some regulatory guidance, be trapped for fur, recreation and/or damage control. Many fish biologists believe that beaver are a significant component of recovery planning for coastal coho and other threatened fish species.  Steve Trask, a fish ecologist, recently talked about the importance of beaver to the health and long-term future of streams in western Oregon.  He noted that production of many native Oregon fish was significantly higher in habitat created by beaver and lamented the ecological collapse of many stream systems that no longer contain beaver or their work.  The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is conducting experimental re-locations of beaver in the Umpqua Basin with the help of some long-bearded, passionate landowners who are committed beaver advocates.  Dr. Mark Needham at Oregon State University completed a recent beaver impact survey with the goal of understanding landowner tolerance levels of beaver in Oregon.  The results of the survey provide some new insights on how we could manage beaver.  Most landowners (57%) in the survey were interested in having beaver on their property or on neighboring properties and killing beaver as opposed to other mitigation measures for damage caused by their activities was deemed an unacceptable alternative regardless of location (rural, urban, eastside and westside) of the respondent.  There is clearly room for more education on beaver and for more compromise on their management.  

Beaver Dam - Photo Courtesy of Defenders of Wildlife

Walking on Bald Hill Natural Area and Farm in January, I noticed that Mulkey Creek was spreading across an ash forest adjacent to the main channel.  Further down the trail and down the creek, I heard the roar of water spilling over an impediment. It was a partial beaver dam that bridged the creek and created a natural saturated floodplain forest and wetland.  I think of all the thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of sweat labor that we spend hauling logs from afar and placing them in streams.  Beaver are cheap and efficient labor. They do these things as a course of life.  Maybe we are slightly envious of them because they are natural creators and reside very comfortably in their ecological role while we struggle with understanding how we should act in nature.

The feeling of unnaturalness, of something truly out of whack, accompanies every flood. People flock to photograph, to witness.  It’s not new, we all remember past floods. Even so, the disquiet is genuine.  Ovid’s account from Metamorphoses captures the sense:

“One man seeks refuge on a hill, another rows in his curving boat where, just before, he’d plowed. . . through woodlands, dolphins roam; they bump against tall branches, dislodging acorns. . .”

Folks come out to photograph, muse, comment, and help.  Suddenly, no one is a stranger. Water nourishes communities even as it threatens.

I didn’t see any dolphins (more’s the pity) in our oaks, but wading down a street towards a friend’s isolated house pulling a canoe was unsettling enough. Cars parked up to their axles in water, horses puzzled (well, maybe horses are always puzzled) at the transformation, fences quivering with the rush of river through their wires. A flood not only transforms the scene—it alters your thinking. It reminds you of what this place wants to be. And it should, well beyond the time when the rivers and creeks return to their banks and we get on with the clean-up.

Let’s get back to that notion that water builds communities. We all know that the towns along the Willamette grew because of it—the river wasn’t just a pleasant feature. This is no longer the case—we have road and rail to move the traffic the water once carried. So what do we do with the river? What about all those areas we never see? The riparian zones too wet for farming? Does it still have the power to define a community even when it isn’t colonizing our streets and lawns? I think so; you probably do too. Our friends Keith and Rachel (Provenance Farms) had a thousand chickens in mobile houses at the corner of Fern and Chapel, now a rising lake. But before you can text “chickens aren’t ducks”, they had people offering to help them move their flock. Offers from people they didn’t even think knew about them or their flock.  So yes, this land we occupy together reveals high ground in more ways than one.  The Greenbelt Land Trust and other organizations work toward keeping the river as river—which includes preserving what is feasible of those lands along its margins where, from time to time, it wanders. As a community, our task, it seems, is to preserve what the high water reveals. We live in a landscape of rivers—the only one we have.

The Marys River flooding portions of Provenance Farm (photo courtesy Alexis Schiedler/Facebook)

What does Greenbelt Land Trust do when it floods? Why, head outdoors and into the fields of course! Executive Director Michael Pope recalls how Staff and landowners spent flooded days touring properties inundated by the Willamette River …

On Friday, January 20^th,  I called landowner Steve Horning who indicated that the Willamette River had partially inundated the land covered by GLT’s conservation easements at Harkens Lake.  Jessica and I jumped in the big white truck and drove down.  We pulled on our big boots and walked to meet Steve and his energetic lab.  The property was now a series of lakes with water filling many of the low lying swales and overflowing the banks of the sloughs and backchannels.  We waded through a number of mini-lakes, taking in the immensity and power of the Willamette River running and roaring across the landscape. The next week, I drove to Ed Rust’s Little Willamette property (200 acres protected by GLT in 2009) just south of Bowers Rock State Park near Albany.  Ed and I jumped in his  small Santiam drift boat and rowed down an ash swale that connected to the old Little Willamette channel that cuts through part of Ed’s property.  I touched the top of a wood duck nest box attached to a tree as we floated by….Ed mentioned that the box was about 11 feet about  the ground during the summer.  We rowed through the dried stalks of left-over summer corn, reaching the southwest corner of his property. We could have sat in that driftboat all day, remembering past floods and humbled by the power of this River and Mother Nature. – Michael Pope

Michael Pope and Steve Horning touring the drier portions of Harkens Lake.

In March 1806, on the return journey up the Columbia River, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition shot a previously un-described species of quail near Beacon Rock, 10 miles east of today’s Portland.  Lewis wrote “last evening Reuben Fields killed a bird of the quail kind.. it is rather larger than the quail or partridge as they are called in Virginia….this is a most beautiful bird.”  A specimen of this bird was subsequently given to the famous illustrator, Charles Willson Peale, and included in a series of sketches of wildlife encountered by the expedition.  That illustration is currently kept by the American Philosophical Society, the first learned society in North America and founded by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in 1743.  Their web-site explains that they pursue equally “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things….”.   This most beautiful bird was eventually described taxonomically as Oreortyx pictus (oreo = Greek for mountain and pict = Latin for painted) or Mountain quail in 1826 by the great northwest naturalist, David Douglas.  He collected a pair of Mountain quail near Elkton but subsequently lost the specimens with “ a multitude of treasures botanical and zoological “ while attempting to cross the raging torrents of the Willamette River.

Mountain Quail

I have held, within my hands, hundreds of wild Mountain quail and they are indeed an astonishingly beautiful bird.  The nape, mantle and rump feathers are a powdery gray-blue graduating to dark greenish-brown secondary and primary wing feathers.  The most striking features of their plumage are their russet-brown flanks interrupted by bold white vertical stripes and the long erect, black top-knot of twin feathers that arises from their foreheads.  The bold white, slightly curving stripes remind me of the elegant sweeping strokes of a calligraphy brush and the top-knot of feudal samurai horseman with their helmeted flags. 

I studied Mountain quail from 1995-2002 as a graduate student and researcher at Oregon State University.  They are a highly private species; secretive and shy, yet found in many diverse and rugged landscapes in the Great Basin and Pacific Coast.  Hikers wandering on high rocky, ridge trails in the Sierras may encounter small coveys of Mountain quail.  I have flushed them in steep brushy side-draws in deep canyons of the Snake River, in nearly impenetrable Manzanita chaparral and in open Oregon white oak forests in southwestern Oregon, and in young Douglas fir forests of the Coast and Cascade ranges.  They assemble in large coveys during dry summer months near watering places in the sage dominated communities of the high deserts of Nevada and California. Sometimes they appear (many miles from their nearest known populations) in unexpected places such as deep in the Owyhee Canyon, in scattered ravines of the Trout Mountains or foraging in a backyard feeder in downtown Lakeview.  Mountain quail are in the Coast Range and foothills and even valleys along the edges of the Willamette Valley.  Someone remarked that they found one staring into a lower ground basement window of Strand Agriculture Hall on OSU’s campus.  They were a mystery bird with big gaps in their life history and much speculation in the literature about their habits.  That, in part, was my attraction to them.  They also have a long narrative history with Oregon, beginning with Lewis’s descriptions near Beacon Rock, continuing through Douglas lamenting the loss of his specimens, and through many other references from many distinguished 19^th and 20^th century naturalists in Oregon.  Their numbers have fallen dramatically in Idaho, Nevada and parts of eastern Oregon. Some believe they should be listed as “endangered” in parts of their range. 

Snake River Canyon

Our work on Mountain quail illuminated some incredible stories.  In most avian species, males generally play no parental role or a very passive one.  However, Mountain quail are true paragons of shared parenthood.  Females lay two simultaneous clutches (in different nests) and the male will incubate one clutch without assistance and the female the other.  Once the chicks are hatched the male shepherds and protects his brood and the female does the same, with the entire family coming together a week or so after hatching.  They are ground-nesters.  I found nests tucked neatly between tall grass clumps, under down logs, between rock crevices and deep inside root wads.  Their plumage provides nearly perfect cryptic camouflage that blends into the background around the nest.  The parents are dedicated nest-sitters.  Sometimes you must gently poke them with a forefinger to get them to leave their nest while you count their eggs.  They hover nearby and always return after you leave. I have observed nests that were likely depredated by a snake who consumed all but one egg and the parent faithfully completed incubation of that single egg. Another remarkable consequence of dual nests is that the female produces up to 27 eggs over one nesting period, a prodigious accomplishment (perhaps unparalleled)  in the avian world.  Mountain quail have great vocals…. from the throaty warbling and chirping assembly calls between covey members to the loud, sharp yelps of territorial males.  In confined spaces they exude a slight earthy odor that one associates with chickens (they are from the Order Galliformes or fowl-like birds).  I love their beauty, unique behaviors, and how you can feel their warmth through their gorgeous plumage when you hold one.  My brief time spent with Mountain quail  offers an example of how we are surrounded by many other life histories aside from our own and that occasionally we can read a few sketchy pages in the stories of other species and further illuminate “…..the Nature of Things…”.

Mountain Quail

The season also draws others to the house, four-footed and furry—sometime between four or five yesterday in the morning last week we woke to serious chicken noise—everyone raising a ruckus. In summer, that can mean pretty much anything, but in winter it only means no good. We’d more or less decided to get out of the boutique chicken business (we have only a few) and turn their shed into a greenhouse once they were gone. And it looked like that process was beginning, so I was less than enthusiastic about defending our Aracanas. Especially at four o’clock on a very dark and foggy night. But defend I did, or tried. Their shed was empty when I stumbled out to it—one chicken hunkered in the corner of the yard, none others to be seen, and piles of feathers everywhere. After futilely poking around for a while, I walked out into the wetland, switched off my light, and listened. I’m not normally out there at that hour—the fog was so thick you felt you were inside it. No lights, not even on Neabeck Hill across the field, and looking back toward the house there was only a sickly glow from our neighbor’s mercury vapor ‘security’ light (which, I’m sure, is visible from space). As I grew accustomed to standing there, noises returned—a few bird calls, something mechanical out on the highway. When a determined rustling approached, I switched on my light, thinking it was a lost chicken and found myself looking at two deer, about twenty feet away, gazing at me as if a man with a shotgun and a flashlight were the most ordinary of things to run across in a field on a predawn morning. I tried my best coyote howl but they remained unimpressed, lowered their heads, and kept searching for something to eat. Lean times indeed.