All posts by Jessica McDonald

Porcini Season

Blog, Uncategorized

I was down in Riverside last week where there was no river and by 11 the temperature was in the 90s. Cossetted in my air-conditioned rooms behind tinted windows, all I could think about was that in Oregon the rains had started. As you know, we’d walked a long dry road, trees were dying,  the forest floor was in classic ‘potato-chip’ condition where every step crunched. And the fires, and the smoke and dust in the valley. Then the rains came, soft and steady, familiar as grandmothers.  And rains mean, among other things, mushrooms. Those in-between growths, fruit really, of unseen and often vast organisms that straddle our classification system—not plant, not animal, not yeasts. . .  Emily Dickinson got it right:

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants—
At Evening, it is not—
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop upon a Spot
As if it tarried always
And yet its whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake’s Delay
And fleeter than a Tare—

‘Tis Vegetation’s Juggler—
The Germ of Alibi—
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie—

I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit—
This surreptitious scion
Of Summer’s circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn
Had Nature an Apostate—
That Mushroom—it is Him!

Surreptitious scions indeed: bright orange witch’s butter, shameless slippery jack, impeccably dressed fly agaric—the Northwest is particularly well-peopled with Nature’s Apostates. But until you meet some mushroom-besotted humans slinking through the undergrowth with plastic buckets in hand and leaves in their hair, who open your eyes to what lies just beneath your feet, mushrooms fade back behind the coffee dates, book reviews, household chores, and ballot measures that loom larger (God knows why. . .) on our horizons.  If landscapes were literature, mushrooms would be its poets; generally a little unkempt although there are the crisp and natty types, a little vaguely defined, and often living on uncertain means of support. Always popping up amid the general debris of the forest floor as if they’ve been there all along, then disappearing in a day or so. And like poets, you don’t even notice that they’re not there until someone points it out. We spent years in New Zealand, for example, tramping the Southern Alps and camping in the coastal forests and discovered that way back when Gondwanaland was breaking up, someone checked the “no mushrooms” box on the New Zealand takeout (of course they checked a good many other boxes too— no ubiquitous television sets, no airborne pollution, no jet trails, no native mammals, no football. . ..) Little Blue Penguins on untrodden shoreline, yes. Vast beech forests, ditto. But Middle Earth doesn’t have the necessary mycorrhizal partners (tree root systems) to support mushrooms although some trees are now entering the country with root clusters carrying mycelia. In about two centuries, you might go hunting for mushrooms (unless the orcs get them) on the slopes around Mt. Aspiring.

So as I gazed at the San Gabriel mountains in the heat and the haze my thoughts turned to the Alsea drainage (sorry, I can’t be more precise than that–  and please don’t ask again) where the rains were falling and where, most likely, my wife was slipping through the salal, heading for the more open slopes under the canopy in search of the chanterelles that announce themselves in bright choruses against the dark pine litter.  Generally we get buckets and buckets of chanterelles, and wear out our desire before we exhaust the particular slopes we hunt on (remember, I asked you not to ask. . .).  Since they are the fruit of the organism, picking as many as you see is like picking all the apples off your tree—the only harm is thrashing around in their environment, disturbing their soil. So it’s help yourself. The biggest worry is that you learn how to silence your ‘greed’ alert. Not a problem for mushrooms, but a problem for pretty much everything else.

Chanterelles are brilliant, no doubt about it yet the real trophies are the boletes— in particular Boletus edulis. They grow throughout the Northern Hemisphere and have been harvested for centuries. Pliny the Elder praised them, centuries of European cooks have lauded them. In fact their very name announces their status: Boletus edulis is Latin for edible mushroom.  They own the concept, and judging from some of the more majestic specimens you see, they know it.  Boletes pop up everywhere—Eastern hardwood forests boast over 100 species, out here we have at least 40. The choice species—king and queen boletes (the French call them cepes, but then again they would). They’re so gorgeous that even people who don’t particularly like to eat them love to find them. You feel as if you’ve received a trophy.  Once I was chauffeuring a friend on her first time hunting and after hearing that we had found big boletes alongside Highway 101, she insisted we drive slowly enough for her to spot them. We drove very very slowly and were not popular.

So this weekend we’re getting a pre-dawn departure. By midmorning we’ll have beached the canoe (remember, you said you wouldn’t ask) and be wading through the underbrush, or sometimes even crawling beneath it, dragging our big plastic buckets and whooping. Back home, the food dryer is ready.

Sleeping Bears

Blog, Outreach, wildlife,

On October 27, 1826 the Scottish botanist and explorer, David Douglas, responded to an attack on one of his guides and pursued and killed a grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) near the Umpqua River.  His journals did not mention many more encounters in western Oregon with these large brown bears. Lewis and Clark described many fearful accounts of encounters with “white bears” (one their names for grizzly bears) along their expedition route.  Sadly if you travel their route today, you may see a  few grizzlies only at one site, Lewis and Clark Pass in Montana.  Grizzly bears occupied most of the western North America before being exterminated in many states including Oregon.   Early human hunters in North America during the Pleistocene crossed vast prairies and high mountains in fear of massive 2200 lb short-faced bears (Arctodus simus) who, if they still lived, would dwarf our largest grizzly bears.  Apparently the last brown bear in Oregon was killed in 1933 on Chesnimnus Creek in Wallowa County.  However, black bears are still common in the state and likely number between 20,000-30,000.  I have seen a number of black bears in the wild, mostly in Oregon’s Coastal Mountains. Some were pure black, others dark brown or beautifully, cinnamon colored.  Most were seen lumbering across logging roads as I drove to various study areas.  I had a giant stuffed brown bear as a child and would often chase my brother around the house holding the bear and growling.  When I was in my thirties my mother called and asked if it was permissible to dispose of my much-loved bear, which after hibernating in the attic for 25 years, was sadly diminished.  I remember pausing a second or two before I granted permission.

During one winter day in 1990, I drove into the Coast Range near Mary’s Peak with 3 wildlife biologists.  Snow had fallen the night before and we often stopped to wrestle chains onto the tires of the 2 pick-ups.  Reaching higher elevations we plowed through snow drifts until we could go no further and then left the trucks to continue on foot.  We had a radio receiver and a general location for the radio-collared bear taken during the previous week.  We were searching for a bear den.  Bill was a graduate student at Oregon State University.  He had captured 12 black bears a year earlier with cabled leg snares and radio-marked them.  His study was to examine how bears used the thick shrubby coastal mountains of the Willamette Basin and perhaps illuminate the reasons why bears strip the sweet outer bark of young trees in some areas but not others.  Thousands of young conifers were lost from this gustatory girdling.

A separate but unique part of his study was to learn more about where bears spend their winter days.  We followed the radio signal down slope for 45 minutes tracking the direction by the volume of the transmitter’s signal.  We paused near a pile of down trees likely blown over during a previous winter wind storm.   Black bears that hibernate in milder climates such as western Oregon are generally more mobile and may occasionally leave their dens to forage during winter months.  Most respond to human noises and smells while in a mild torpor condition, and may leave their dens if disturbed, so we were very cautious and silent as we crept around the down trunks. No luck.  We could not pin-point the location of the entry point for the den.  I turned to walk a few steps towards a down log and then stopped to consider abandoning our search for fear that we would spook the bear (a female) that was likely with cubs when a slight breeze brought a very rank odor from the direction of the down log.  I quickly backed down the slope signaling to Bill and our other companions that the den was likely in the down log.  Our day was done, the den location was recorded and we left to return to our trucks.  Bears like to smell and that was good because now we would be able to return in the spring after the bears had left and take measurements of the den and describe the surrounding vegetation.  We located 10 den sites that winter.  Most were in large stumps or down logs.  Bill and I inadvertently found one den because of nasal congestion.  We had stopped to get our bearings and turned off our radio receiver and paused to decide our next course when we heard loud snores from a nearby large stump.  The female was deeply asleep in a large cavity excavated at the bottom of the stump.  We could barely hear two cubs mewling above their mother’s stentorian snores.  We located one den in an ancient live Douglas-fir near Alsea.  When I returned to the den that spring and removed the piles of vegetation near the small entry, I crawled into the spacious interior cavity excavated by the bear. The floor of the cavity was littered with dried leaves and wood shavings.  It was large enough so I could stand up inside the tree.   I felt like Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest hiding from the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Waterworld

Blog

Summer lingers, and fades. Like everything else this time of year—the Coast Range erased by local dust and distant smoke, the Cascades somewhere off behind the haze. Cracked earth. Everything asking for just a little moisture. The ferns are crispy, the grass hardens. Our chickens stand around, stunned (okay, they always stand around stunned. . .)

I think back on this summer’s visit to my mother’s cabin on an island in the St. Mary’s River channel of Lake Huron, along the northern shore.  A water world—soft ground, mosses everywhere, granite shorelines sloping into water so clear you can see puddingstone slabs on the bottom at 25 feet with their characteristic nuggets of red and brown jasper.   Her island sits a mile from shore in a stand of birch, red oak, and cedar— along the hem of  the Canadian Shield. Everywhere you look you see the footprints of glaciers—polished rock faces, ancient moraines, and, of course, the melted remnants of the glaciers themselves that created these lakes. Water in one form or another is the presiding architect of that environment. Even the spiders swim, or at least some of them do—we were canoeing back to her dock one evening when we came upon a spider the size of a playing card (but imagine a very creepy playing card) calmly walking across the narrow channel between two islands. At first we thought it was the nose of a swimming beaver, but there was no wake, and this didn’t really look like a nose, even from that distance. It was a spider, one that actually catches minnows. This is why I do not like camping on her island but always sleep inside. The bears don’t bother me at all—coming across a spider that catches bears worries me.

 

The most interesting features of the island are the bogs, a very special sort of waterworld; ancient, unexpected, curious. We paddled along the lily-pads in the larger bog that had formed in a narrow cut behind a blocked creek and extended for a mile or so before ending in a long pool of about two acres. Sediment had accumulated to the extent that the water was, in places, only a few inches beneath our canoes— each paddle stroke released bubbles of gas from the bottom.  It was as if we had been shrunken and placed inside the very back of someone’s refrigerator—back where things change into dark, unrecognizable messes, and life takes on strange, new forms. Several species of leeches undulated near the surface; thick clumps of vegetation, most harboring a host of living plants, are loosely moored around the edges.  Turtles sunned on the aprons of lodges the beavers abandoned as the bog silted up.

 

But the most amazing inhabitants were the carnivorous plants: sundews and pitcher-plants, floating on their clumps of mossy, rotting vegetation. Some of the sundew colonies were in late bloom, sending up a single long-stalked flower that looked a little like the Space Needle and was equally improbable. Shining droplets along their leaf clusters twinkled enticingly— you could easily forgive a gnat for wanting a closer look. From a kayak we could inspect them just at eye level, and each time felt drawn into a very private world, a world of unexpected, if slow-motion, violence, despite its beauty.  The pitcher-plants were less opulent but equally fascinating—most held a slowly dissolving bug or fly, and their gorgeous architecture (all those curves) is one of nature’s most successful fatal attractions—I’m sure we can all imagine analogues here, but I like to stick with just the plants for a moment. Water levels are dropping—and these plants might not be around much longer. Oregon’s Darlingtonia State natural Site north of Florence has a great collection of carnivorous plants, and a boardwalk curving out into their habitat (well worth a trip).

The other bog, the sort we lack in Oregon, is a true woodland quaking bog. It too has pitcher plants and sundews, less prominently displayed but in equal abundance, nestled in deep moss, the cranberries and the tiny sweet blueberries. The shore shakes as you walk over it, and sinks as you approach the water’s edge. Someday (not soon) it will close over. We used to swim in it, and poke our legs under the verge – until we discovered the leeches. This time we were happy to look at sundews, and marvel at the water pooling under our feet even as we stood among saplings. It seems so tenuous, even though it’s been marching along its particular succession path for millennia: fragile, delicate, and rare. This is an ancient world—one that elsewhere yielded giant elk and even human remains—the Tollund Man was almost perfectly preserved in a bog. What goes in, stays. Seamus Heaney said it best:

The ground itself is kind, black butter
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.

Who knows what is in the bog on my mother’s island? It’s been there long enough to have a wooly mammoth or two. With changes in climate (already the water levels are dropping from diminished snow melt—cabin owners are extending their docks every year) it may not be there for as long as originally planned.

 

The Lonely Oboist…

Blog, Outreach

Tonight we’re here looking out over this beautiful valley, listening to brilliant music, enjoying good food in the company of friends. The scene breathes harmony. But we can’t take that for granted. An ecosystem is like an orchestra—providing the music to our lives. This particular orchestra is extraordinarily complex and has many many members—the coast range as the big bowed double basses with their nearly tectonic energy, the firs are stately violas. . . . the creeks and the rivers variously flutes or bassoons. Somewhere in there are the frogs, Cooper’s hawks, the fungi, and the friendly worms whose roofs we’re perching on even now—Every voice, every member seen and unseen, plays a part.  And we must not take this for granted. If one day we awake and sense that the violas have fallen silent, and later notice that the French horns have disappeared. . . and the bassoons are failing, it may be too late to get them back. This vital music will be lost. What we see around us is what we need to see in this place, and what we must leave to our children and their children. Greenbelt Land Trust has been around for 23 year to help ensure that we don’t leave our children a lonely oboist playing in a parking lot. That’s no substitute for the music our valley provides.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the Greenbelt’s recent successful campaigns have received quite a bit of favourable press recently—front page in the Gazette Times, an editorial inside, and various mention elsewhere–  and this is all good.  It draws in new members to the community and energizes others.  Most of the work of the Greenbelt community leaves no sign indicating who was responsible– thirty years from now when some young fisherman pulls a trout from the cool waters of the Horseshoe Lake back channel, there will be no tag saying “Trout courtesy of the supporters of the GLT”—but it will be true none the less.

The Oak Savannas of Home

Blog,

* This post has been adapted from “Toward a political ecology of ecosystem restoration” by John C. Bliss and A. Paige Fischer, Chapter 10 in Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration; Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, edited by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams.

The lone Oregon White Oak (Quercus garyyana) standing majestically above a hillside of prairie grass and flowers, is an icon of the Willamette Valley, and of the Greenbelt Land Trust. For many of us, a landscape of dark green oaks punctuating an open savannah just feels like home.

Our personal attachment to the oak savanna landscape is not unique; ever since our species’ emergence on the grassy plains of Africa, Homo sapiens has demonstrated a special affinity for mixed, open-canopy woodland and savanna landscapes.  With their abundance and diversity of game and edible plants, fuel for cooking and warmth, protection from weather and wide-open views of predators, these landscapes provided everything hunter-gatherers needed. Over the millennia that humans co-evolved with these systems, the landscape imprinted on us, compelling us to seek stands of widely spaced trees over prairie grasses in which to live.  In turn, we imprinted our will on the landscape through pervasive, deliberate, and sophisticated management to fulfill human needs.

Oregon’s Willamette Valley is bordered by isolated remnants of the oak savanna and woodlands that once dominated the entire basin from the lower slopes of the Coast Range on the west to the Cascade Mountains on the east.  These ecosystems, appealing to the human eye and rich in biodiversity, are among the state’s most endangered, covering only a few percent of the area they occupied at the time of Euro-American settlement in the mid-1800s. Their story illustrates the complex interplay between ecological dynamics and evolving human values, preferences, needs and constraints.

The history of oak savanna corresponds to the history of human presence in the Pacific Northwest; both date back more than 6,000 years to the end of the most recent dry period in North American climate (Stein 1990). It appears the habitat assumed a range of ecosystem functions and disturbance patterns throughout its history (McShea and Healy 2002). For example, tree core data from several sites in the Pacific Northwest indicate Willamette Valley oaks burned frequently by low intensity fires, but only between the mid-1700s and 1900 (Agee 1993). This lack of consistency suggests that oak may have conformed more to variations in human activity than to other ecological processes.

Kalapuya and other local Native American groups were some of the first people to shape Willamette Valley ecosystems to meet their needs. Prior to European settlement they used fire as a management tool to maintain gardens of camas (Camassia spp.), a native prairie plant whose starchy bulb was a food staple, and foster the growth of tarweed, grasshoppers, nut and berry plants, and bracken fern rhizomes (Agee 1993, Boyd 1999). They also set fires to herd deer for hunting. Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana) is adapted to fire in ways that other species, such as Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menzeissi), are not. Their thick bark protects the delicate cambium and dormant buds are located low on the root collar below the soil surface so they can sprout even after fire (Tveten and Fonda 1999). The fires the Kalapuya set thinned the understory of the oak woodlands and savannas, maintaining the stands’ open structure, enhancing tree vigor and seedling regeneration and increasing mast crops for consumption by both humans and game (Agee 1993, Agee 1995, Boyd 1999, Peter and Harrington 2002, Van Lear and Brose 2002). The fires also limited infestations by invasive plants and acorn boring insects (Anderson 2005). The fires promoted the local oak species over other tree species. The net effect of Kalapuyan management was to create an overstory of widely-spaced, large-crowned Oregon white oak trees with an understory of shrubs and perennial native grasses (Agee 1990).

Euro-American pioneers in the Willamette Valley also burned the land (Boyd 1999). Yet these settlers who displaced the Native Americans also brought with them a set of values, preferences, needs and constraints that stood in stark contrast to those of their predecessors.  Where Kalapuyans saw prime camas grounds, settlers saw potential pastures and crop fields. In open oak woodlands they saw cabin logs, lumber, and well-drained agricultural fields.  And in wildfire they saw a threat to their homes and settlements. As a result, camas fields were ditched and drained, wooded savannas were cleared and plowed, and, in the absence of fires, oak stands developed thick understories and shade-tolerant species, such as Douglas-fir, encroached on and outcompeted oak in the canopy.

As the region became the nation’s timber basket during the twentieth century landowners cultivated and encouraged Douglas-fir anywhere it would grow, converting oak-canopied pastures, fields, and woodlands to timber plantations. Farmers shifting to more lucrative crops, such as rye grass, also removed savanna oaks that cast shade onto their fields on the valley floor. In the foothills, woodlands and savannas were converted to residential areas, Christmas tree plantations, and vineyards. Residents in the Willamette Valley viewed open meadows and savanna primarily as candidate areas for conversion to other uses including Christmas tree plantations and conifer plantations, often with assistance from natural resource professionals (Fischer and Bliss 2009).

The Valley is now home to the cities of Eugene, Corvallis, and Salem, and to 70% of the State of Oregon’s population. On sites with better soils, dense stands of Douglas-fir are managed for timber production on industrial ownerships, habitat and water on public ownerships, and mixed objectives on family ownerships. Pure oak stands remain only on marginal sites where other species cannot thrive and for which people have found no other use or value. One legacy of Euro-American settlement that has had a dramatic effect on essentially all Willamette Valley oak sites is the introduction of non-native species, notably Himalayan blackberry (Rubus discolor) and false brome (Brachypodium sylvaticum).

The forest and human landscapes of the Willamette Valley co-evolved; as human needs and culture changed so did landscape structure. Through their use of fire, the Kalapuyans had, in effect, shaped the ecosystems of the Valley to suit their needs; the needs of people living at low population densities in scattered communities moving seasonally across a dynamic landscape. Euro-American settlement, elimination of fire, and shifts in forestry and agriculture further changed the landscape.  A century and a half later, subsequent generations of residents are continuing to transform the landscape, shaping it to reflect prevailing values, needs, preferences and constraints.

In the 1990s a movement emerged to protect remnant oak stands and restore oak to the Valley. Catalyzed by the recognition of oak woodlands and savannas as two of the most threatened habitat in the state of Oregon (Oregon Biodiversity Project 1998), the Oregon Oak Communities Working Group formed to support the conservation and restoration of oak. Composed of scientists, extension foresters, landowners and representatives of conservation organizations, the group focused their initial efforts on the Willamette Valley, where oak savanna historically dominated the landscape. The Greenbelt Land Trust has emerged as a leader in protecting and restoring oak ecotypes in the Valley.  Many signature GLT projects and properties include oak woodlands and savannahs, including Chip Ross Park, Fitton Green, and Bald Hill Natural Area.  These efforts to conserve oak ecotypes represent just the latest in a continually evolving set of values, institutions, tenure arrangements and behaviors shaping our human community’s relationship with our landscape.

What can we learn from the story of these Willamette Valley ecosystems? First, oak woodlands and savannas are “anthropogenic” ecosystems that co-evolved with their human inhabitants. Indeed, co-evolution might be a useful way to think about the relationship between humans and ecosystems we should strive for through ecological restoration; it implies the possibility and necessity of evolving new human values and behaviors in our relationship to the landscapes we inhabit.

Second, we humans don’t have some generic impact on these landscapes; we imprint them with remarkable detail, reflecting specific values, preferences, needs and constraints, just as their conditions affect human culture. Landscapes themselves are enduring reflections of cultural values, resistant cultural artifacts reflecting past values and beliefs (Nassauer 1995).

Third, determining target conditions for restoration, then, necessarily involves consideration of the behavior and culture that created or maintained the desired ecological condition. Target conditions inescapably reflect and privilege particular patterns of human activity, and the associated values and constraints, over others.  Beginning with the claim that an ecosystem is in need of conservation or restoration, one is engaging in choices based upon (often competing) human values, preferences and cognitive constructs.

Fourth, all questions of land use, including restoration, involve issues of tenure; the formal and informal system of rules and practices that govern rights to access, use, and disposal of land and land resources. When Euro-American settlers took up residence in the Willamette Valley, they imposed an entirely different tenure system on the land from that of the Kalapuyans, with profound impacts on land use and management. Since settlement, tenure rights have been continuously renegotiated as social norms for land use have evolved – from commons to homesteads, to timber and agriculture crops, to amenities – and each renegotiation has affected the landscape.

Finally, relationships between humans and landscapes are dynamic, coevolving in response to changing biophysical, cultural, economic, political and social conditions. We humans don’t just occupy ecosystems; we are integral components of complex socio-ecological systems.  Recognizing our evolutionary role in co-creating the landscapes we inhabit enriches our understanding of who we are, where we live, and how we might influence the future landscapes of home.

This post has been adapted from “Toward a political ecology of ecosystem restoration” by John C. Bliss and A. Paige Fischer, Chapter 10 in Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration; Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture, edited by Dave Egan, Evan E. Hjerpe, and Jesse Abrams.  Copyright 2011 Island Press.  Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.   http://islandpress.org/ip/books/book/silandpress/H/bo8057440.html.

References

Agee, J.K. 1990. The historical role of fire in Pacific Northwest forests. In Natural and prescribed fire in Pacific Northwest forests, edited by J.D. Walstad, S.R. Radosevich and D.V. Sandberg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press.

Agee, J.K. 1993. Fire Ecology of Pacific Northwest Forests. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Agee, J.K. 1995. Fire in Restoration of White Oak Woodlands. In The Use of Fire in Forest Restoration:  A General Session at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ecological Restoration, Sept. 14-16, edited by C.C. Hardy and S.F. Arno. Seattle, WA: USDA Forest Service.

Anderson, K. 2005. Tending the wild: Native American knowledge and the management of California’s natural resources. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Boyd, R. 1999. Strategies of Indian Burning in the Willamette Valley. In Indians, Fire and the Land, edited by R. Boyd. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press.

Fischer, A.P. 2006. Private Forests, Public Policy:  Oak Conservation on Family Forests in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Ph.D. dissertation. Corvallis, Oregon: Oregon State University. 262 pp.

Fischer, A.P. and J.C. Bliss. 2009. Framing conservation on private lands: Conserving oak in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Society & Natural Resources 22(10): 884-900.

McShea, W.J. and W.M. Healy, eds. 2002. Oak Forest Ecoystems: Ecology and Management for Wildlife. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.

Nassauer, J.I. 1995. Culture and changing landscape structure. Landscape Ecology 10(4): 229-237.

Oregon Biodiversity Project. 1998. Oregon’s Living Landscape:  Strategies and Opportunities to Conserve Biodiversity. Portland, OR: Defenders of Wildlife.

Peter, D. and C. Harrington. 2002. Site and Tree Factors in Oregon White Oak Acorn Production in Western Washington and Oregon. Northwest Science 76(3): 189-201.

Stein, W.I. 1990. Quercus garryana Dougl. ex. Hook. In Silvics of North America, Volume 2, Hardwoods. U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Agricultural Handbook 654, edited by R.M. Burns and B.H. Honkala. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.

Tveten, R.K. and R.W. Fonda. 1999. Fire Effects on Prairies and Oak Woodlands on Fort Lewis, Washington. Northwest Science 73(3): 145-158.

Van Lear, D.H. and P.H. Brose. 2002. Fire and Oak Management. In Oak Forest Ecosystems: Ecology and Management for Wildlife, edited by W.J. McShea and W.M. Healy. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press.