All posts by Jessica McDonald

Family Roots and Hound Dogs

Blog, Uncategorized,

Many of the early settlers in the Willamette Valley were rural farmers from Kentucky, Missouri and other southeastern States.  They migrated to the Willamette Valley, built rough cabins, planted grains and vegetables in river bottom ground, and grazed cattle, sheep and goats in the vast upland grass-covered prairies and savannas.

I have lived in the southeast, northeast and, for the past 35 years, in the Pacific Northwest; an exception to most of my ancestors who migrated little, and lived and died in the same communities as their fathers and mothers.  Like the vast root networks and canopies of ancient legacy Oregon oaks in the Willamette farm fields, my family roots extend deep into the rural black belt soils of Alabama.  My mother’s father (Papa Dickens) was a peanut farmer in central Alabama. Papa Dickens and Bertha had a small farm near the town of Brundidge (Alabama) where they kept a flock of laying hens in the back yard. He often sat on the front porch wearing his faded coveralls with his sister Neil and they both occasionally directed a stream of tobacco juice to a nearby spittoon.  My grandparents would offer their thick feather bed to the Pope children (my sisters, brother and I) visiting from up north (North Carolina and Virginia).  Their house smelled of fried chicken and field peas with ham cooking on the stovetop.  Grandfather Pope was a newspaper editor and local judge in Marion, a small rural town in south central Alabama.  During the Second World War my older sister and mother lived with his family while my father was away fighting in the Pacific.  I never met my Grandfather Pope.  My mother says he was soft spoken with a warm smile.  Apparently (according to family stories), he loved hounds and had dozens in his back yard.  After work, he would often “attend to the hounds” which consisted of sitting with them while he sipped some spirits from a bottle normally hidden in the dog pens and away from the disapproving eyes of my grandmother.   During campaign years, he would hit the road in his old truck filled with dogs in the back bed and a load of figural pottery jugs filled with libations.  The jugs were made by a local potter and contained an image of my grandfather’s face sculpted on the sides of the jug and inscribed with “Irby Pope-The Only Judge”.

 He traveled his campaign circuit apparently handing the jugs to prospective voters and occasionally offering a spare hound or two as part of the deal, if needed.  My mother says, he loved riding out to remnants of a family farm in the country with a load of dogs and sitting under an old pecan tree, perhaps imbibing a little spirits and watching the dogs frolic in fields.  Occasionally a dog would go missing during his visits to the farm, but that was fine, because any strays would be picked up during the next visit.

My great-uncle Abe (my father’s uncle) owned and operated a ramshackled country store in Sprott, Alabama where farmers collected their mail, bought gas, and sipped coca cola on the covered front porch.  The store was photographed by the famous New Deal photographer, Walker Evans  in 1935 and is considered an iconic image of the rural south during the depression.

My ancestors have wonderful names such as Abram, Claudius, Marcy, Bertha, Jemina, Zeke, Tempie,  Mehitabel, Archelus, and Zachariah and a number are buried among the ancient moss cover oaks in the historic Live Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama including  “Indiana Jones.”

 For me, the spring and summer are days of memories.  Remembering our mothers and fathers, our war dead and injured, and recalling the last winter days of cold spring rains and winter fog in the Willamette Valley.

One-hundred and fifty year’s ago (April 30th, 1862) last spring, Thomas Evans Irby, a planter,  wrote a letter from Wynne’s Mill, Virginia to his wife in Marion, Alabama.  “I have been anxious for some time to sit down and write you a long letter, to have a good chat with you dear wife, about your own dear self and the sweet precious children…..the enemy have been shelling our position constantly for nearly four weeks..”  He describes how “it is getting to be opinion here that we may not have a general battle” after McClellan’s army made their appearance before their works some three weeks earlier.  Lt. Colonel Thomas E. Irby from the 8th Alabama had yearned since arriving in Virginia in spring 1861 to take leave for a month-long visit with his wife living in Marion.  His weekly letters described this yearning and his frustration that his leave was postponed because of the protracted absence and illness of his superior, Colonel Winston.  Finally on March 28th,1862 while at Harwood’s Mill, Virginia, he was granted leave and departed for Yorktown and then was to journey south to Alabama for a month long visit with his wife after spending over a year in Virginia without seeing her.  However, while in Yorktown, he “met with an order all furloughs are revoked and officers of this Department will report to respective posts at once”.  His final line from the April 30th letter was “now dearest I must go to bed.  Good night, a kiss for all the children and a thousand for yourself, from your own husband.”  An after action report of an engagement on May 4th from General Longstreet included “the service and the country have alike sustained a grievous loss in the death of Col. G. T. Ward, commanding the Second Florida, and Lieut. Col. Thomas E. Irby, commanding the Eighth Alabama. Colonel Ward fell almost at the first fire, as he was leading his men most gallantly into action. Colonel Irby fell after his command had been for some time hotly engaged, and not until he had given many proofs of great skill and courage.”

Somewhat like my great-great grandfather, 70 years ago my father composed a series of letters to my mother in Spring 1942.  He was also stationed as a Captain in the army in Virginia, while she lived in Alabama.  He also wrote of his love and affection for her and shortly left for 3 years of fighting in the South Pacific.

My father survived the Pacific War and lived until 1984.  After the war, he did not return to rural Alabama but stayed in the army, moving the family from one military post to another.  While my older sister was born in Selma, Alabama, my twin brother and sisters were born in Fort Sill, Oklahoma.  I was born in the partially bombed out city of Salzburg, Austria where my father was part of an American occupation force.  My mother hung diapers from 3 children on improvised clothes-lines in our room (temporary quarters) located in a 18th century Hotel along the Salzach River and cooked dinners between electricity blackouts as the city struggled to repair its power grid.  My mother turns 96 in November.  When I visit, she tells me little bits of family history that I cherish and recreate into a graphic memory.  Her memories stretch back to the days when ancient civil war veterans still sipped coca cola on great-Uncle Abe’s storefront porch and bare-footed farm children pulled penny-candy out of jars on his counter tops.

Dog Days of August

Blog, Outreach, wildlife,

“Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;. . . .”

Auden’s  famous ‘Under Sirius’ says it all—the streams are sunk to a “soodling thread”, we wither under the Dog Star. The temperature hits triple digits, the grass hardens, the sheep nose about in the shade for something tender and must settle for blackberry leaves. Barley in the neighbor’s field grows heavy-headed, waiting for harvest. Portents gather—soon we’ll see the Perseid meteorite shower. . . .  This is the season of the porch, the day trip to somewhere high in the Cascades (Browder Ridge is nice. . .), the slow drift down the Willamette. In this part of the world, August feels like a pause in the seasonal monologue.

I recently had a different sort of pause in a very different sort of place. Paris in July is famous for being noisy, crowded with tourists, and close.  In fact it is simply muggy and electric, but otherwise much the same as at other times.  The one day I wriggled free of work I wandered about the city. I’d been staying near the Place d’Italie in the old student quarter, eating with the Dominicans at the Saulchoir. Not far away lay the Jardin des Plantes, surely the most straitforward of names for any botanical park. A royal park since the early 17th century, it later housed the survivors of the royal menagerie of Versailles after the French Revolution, and now boasts a genetic diversity encompassing thousands of species of plants (think of it as a down-at-the-heels cousin of the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew, with better sandwiches) and an institution to catalogue and study them. And there are still animals—lonely ostriches, bewildered raccoons, an antisocial tapir.  And of course, lots of statues. The one I found myself contemplating that day in July was entitled ‘Denicheur d’ Oursons’—The Bear Tracker.

It’s a particularly dramatic, larger than life depiction of a man locked in a death struggle with what seems to be a grizzly bear. The bear, standing erect, is about to bite the face of the hunter it embraces, who has driven what looks like a large screw into its neck.The artist, L. Fremiet (died 1910), often took animals for his subject, having spent time in the Jardin des Plantes dissecting their corpses. He was also the official painter for the Paris morgue. In other words, he did not paint from life, but from death. And of course his heroic view of early frontiersmen was based on his own imagination, not observation. Which is an important point. What he gives us in the form of a bear is preposterous—its arms and elbows are like a man’s, only thicker and covered with fur; its knees and hips too suggest a creature accustomed to walking upright. And the hunter, while anatomically perfect, is curiously naked save a head band and string belt from which dangles a dead cub, presumably the casus belli. Yet the cub is so small as to be practically embryonic and as for the narrative, it’s highly unlikely that a tracker could successfully poach a cub without knowing he’d instantly have to deal with the mother.

We have, in other words, a moment of supreme crisis for both the mother bear and the hunter. It is a narrative of the New World, the savage frontier. It makes a striking tableau, but Fremiet’s ‘Bear Tracker’ is a projection, a cartoon, perhaps even a morality tale.  His other monumental works tell similar tales: an orang-utan strangling a naked Borneo native, a gorilla carrying off a shrieking (and, yes, naked) woman— all dramatic, all violent, and all equally implausible as a response to the way humans encounter the non-human world.

I ate my sandwich watching the pigeons leave their offerings on the bear’s head, and felt the need to animals everywhere.  There’s a danger in letting our projections dictate what lessons we think nature teaches, what stories it offers. M. Fremiet seems to suggest a narrative where we’re locked in a struggle with predatory forces bent on violence. If that’s the case (and it may well be), the verdict is already in—bears and gorillas and orang-utans have already lost. We get the statues and they get extinguished.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can—and must, I think—adopt the notion, best articulated by Mary Oliver, that the natural world is “the doorway into thanks” where a blue iris is cousin to the weed. Just one generation before Fremiet, another Frenchman, dodging military conscription, came to the New World intent on pursuing a passion for birds he’s had since childhood: J. J. Audubon. His observations, drawn from years of field work under difficult conditions, often with the collaboration and support of local tribes who had an entirely different narrative to share concerning the natural world, were so detailed they drew praise and admiration from Charles Darwin. Audubon captures not only the precise detail of his subjects (both birds and mammals) but of their surroundings—the curl of a leaf, the shade of a flower.

This was nature without human overlay, nature as it deserves to be seen and respected independent of human fantasy. Gone are the dramatic moments, the writhing bodies, the sense of doom, the moment of crisis. Instead, what we see when we sit still for a long time is what has been going on, bit by bit, for a very, very long time.
As Mary Oliver says,

“For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer

every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose. . .”
Perhaps our best response to the natural world is to permit, wherever we can, this ‘gracious repose.’ Even in the Dog Days, happy for a little shade.

Black Cottonwoods

Blog, Outreach, Restoration

A few years ago, I was invited on a walk along the Willamette River to look at a parcel of land that contained some remnant backchannels and a riparian gallery forest near Salem. The riparian forest was remarkable because it contained a number of enormous black cottonwood trees that towered over the ashes, alders, maples and conifers.  Cottonwoods are one of my most favored trees.  They thrive on floodplains.  Arno and Hammerly in their wonderful book, Northwest Trees, mentioned that cottonwoods in floodplains “grow tall and develop great, arching branch-trunks that form a light-filtering canopy high overhead.”  Some of the largest cottonwood trees soar over 200 feet and have trunks that exceed 6 feet in diameter.  The triangular ovate leaves of black cottonwood are notable because the upper surfaces are dark green while the undersides are pale green to silver-white.  In the Natural History of Western Trees, Peattie poetically described the black cottonwood forests in the Columbia Gorge:  “And when the great drafts blow up and down the Columbia gorge, the cool indrafts of sea wind or the hot exhaling breath of the interior basin east of the Cascades- they go plowing through the riparian forests.  Then the black cottonwood comes into its full beauty, for on one side the leaf blades are darkly glittering, on the other almost silvery white with rusty veins….the trees seems, like the sea, to break into whitecaps before the wind.  Then, as the breeze dies down, they regain for the moment their green composure.” In the basin and ranges of the west, rivers are necklaces of brilliant yellow as the cottonwood leaves turn color in the fall.

Aside from their great girth, stature and beauty, black cottonwoods are generous seeders and sprouters.  Each tree contains either female or male catkins.  The female flowers mature into 4-inch long branches of light green capsules that split open in late spring and early summer and fill the air with white cotton-like plumes bearing seeds.  The cotton plumes are like late spring snows blanketing forest floors, clustering on shrubby branches of ocean spray, snowberry and elderberry, and occasionally soaring into my open office window near the Corvallis waterfront.   Like most poplars, cottonwoods are avid re-sprouters. Disturbance is a common (and critical) ecological function in floodplains and cottonwoods evolved to take advantage of waters that surge into bottomland hardwood forests and scour forest floors. Cottonwood roots are often shallow, just below the surface of sandy rocky soils found in floodplains. If their roots are exposed or disturbed, they often respond by sprouting numerous aerial shoots that may grow, through time, into towering giants.   Like willows, cottonwood branch cuttings stuck into the ground will set root and create trees.  Arno and Hammerly described how a railroad car filled with cottonwood logs left to overwinter in a side yard was soon “engulfed in a forest of sprouts.”

Scientists refer to species that have been extensively studied as “model organisms”. Cottonwoods fall into that category because they grow fast, are easily propagated and hybridize readily giving them great potential for many human uses such as windrows, flood buffers, and paper pulp.  Apparently the entire complex genome of black cottonwood is understood for it was the first tree species to have its genes fully sequenced in 2006. Cottonwoods and humans have a long and productive relationship. Native Americans used cottonwood resin to treat sore throats, coughs, and many other ailments.  Nancy Turner in the Ethnobotany of Bella Coola Indians of British Columbia described how an infusion of cottonwood buds mixed with sockeye salmon oil was used as a remedy for baldness.  The same infusion mixed with goat fat was an ointment for sunburn and a skin cream. Native Americans fed the inner bark and leaves to their horses.  They harvested the inner cambium of cottonwoods, and sundried and ate this sweet bark with grease.  Sap was dried or eaten fresh and the trunk and branch wood used to build canoes and lodges.  Cottonwood fibers were used to make baskets, fishing nets, ropes (mixed with dog hair), mats, rugs and bedding, and the buds boiled to make yellow dyes and paints.  Jeff Hart in Montana Native Plants and Early Peoples said that the sap was also used to conceal human scent when stealing horses. The members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition carved most of their dugout canoes from cottonwood trunks and used the trees to make wheels and axels for portaging equipment.

Cottonwood forests provide great benefits to aquatic and wildlife species. Bald eagles, ospreys and numerous song birds use their broad branches to build nests or roost.  Live and dead trees are often pockmarked with holes used by cavity nesting birds and some mammals like western tree squirrels. Branches and tops of cottonwoods frequently split and break, and the cavity left behind becomes the home of some wild creature. We often paused on our walks through Bald Hill Farm to watch an industrious colony of acorn woodpeckers fly in and out of cavities in cottonwood snag.  Unfortunately, the snag broke in half in 2011 and the woodpeckers found another home. I once pounded on the large trunk of a cottonwood snag with a stick hoping to hear resonating sounds of a 60 foot hallow drum when a large red-headed pileated woodpecker stuck her head out of a cavity in the tree and peered angrily down at my drumming antics.  Occasionally black bears will hibernate in cavities at ground level or higher in up in the trunk of large cottonwoods that have some heart rot.  Beavers love cottonwood bark (to eat) and they harvest the branches and trunks to construct dams.  During my Salem site visit, one of the largest cottonwoods was nearly girdled by a beaver that ate through the tough outer layers to reach the sweeter inner cambium. Canopies of cottonwoods are permeable and allow for filtered sunlight to reach forest floors. The thick, rich layers of cottonwood leaf litter, compounded through many generations, produce fertile substrates for many deciduous trees and shrubs that in turn provide abundant food and shelter for wildlife.

Cottonwoods are great colonizers.  They enter into disturb sites and grow rapidly outpacing competitors such as conifers and other hardwoods.  However cottonwood seeds need moist soils for germination and saplings require wet substrates to thrive. The ecology of the species is deeply intertwined with periodic inundations and alluvial soils.  Sediments pushed into floodplains by floods create the best germination seedbeds for cottonwoods.  Roots need seasonal exposure to waters from high water events.  The construction of dams has resulted in the reduction of flood events and also created poor conditions for cottonwood regeneration and survival.

Walking among forests of giant cottonwoods or any gigantic trees is a humbling and profound experience.  Paddling into quiet Willamette River off-channel alcoves that are ringed with stately cottonwoods is like entering into an aquatic cathedral with towering columns and soaring arches. Sometimes, sitting motionless in my kayak staring up at the serene canopies of silver and green leaves, I forget that these magnificent trees depend on often violent flood events for their creation and subsistence.

Grasslands …

Blog, Outreach, Restoration,

This country has always been defined by its grasslands as much as it has been by its forests, mountain ranges, and rivers. Grass informs our landscapes, shapes our history, and probably has more to do with our future than we realize.

Our western grasslands are iconic. In 1541, on his quest for yet another fabled city of gold long before the pioneers headed west from St. Joseph, Coronado marched northeast from Mexico City to Kansas. In the middle of what would become Texas he noted, tersely, “I reached some plains.” Indeed.  He was the first European to encounter a sea of grass more vast than anything west of the Russian steppes. Shedding their armor and weapons in the summer heat, he and his men trekked to the banks of the Kansas River (chain mail was found as late as 1880 along their route) through what to them was a featureless vegetal ocean. Unknown to him, at the same time De Soto, coming from the east, was crossing the Mississippi, noting the same endless vistas along the way. Both followed game trails through head-high grass, and both noted that the native populations were adept at navigation in this formidable environment.  Even today you can see that grass here and there—most notably at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas and a similar tallgrass prairie in Oklahoma.

Like our native grasslands here in Oregon, the prairie was managed by fire. We tried that on a piece of virgin savanna my father bought in western Illinois after he’d read about the Nature Conservancy’s efforts at managing tallgrass prairie further west. One late October day we lit a section, figuring the recent rains would keep things under control. What we hadn’t counted on was the fact that nearly a century’s worth of accumulation had built up quite a fuel base beneath the stalks. . . and under the adjacent trees. The result was that five of us spent a frantic night tracking the slowly moving fireline through the hardwoods as it flared up slopes through hickory, ash, walnut and oak, and slowly ate its way down the slopes towards the creeks.  It never caught any of the trees, but had a good time with the accumulated leaf litter underfoot. We ended up burning quite a bit more than we intended, and considerably more than we owned. It looked terrible. I think my father began to doubt the wisdom of this most recent experiment (re-introducing wild turkeys the year before had been a brilliant success. . . so he was on a roll.) But the next spring was a miracle—first, as the ground thawed, flowers we’d never seen poked up, then deep lush grass far more vigorous than before. And wild ginseng and sassafras. These, we discovered, had been there all along, but hidden. The park ranger next door (Siloam Springs State park) was suitably impressed and initiated his own burn, albeit more controlled. And the other neighbor, whose woods we scorched, (and liked all the excitement) said the morels that spring were prolific, so he planned to burn regularly.

And now is the season for haying. The oddly comforting smell of a newly mown field this time of year claims our valley as surely as the smell of sagebrush conjures the high plains of central Oregon. Cut grass is particularly evocative for farm kids I suspect. As a teenager I spent summers on a haying crews back in western Illinois—in the days when baling entailed a triple rig of tractor, baler, and wagon with one driver on the tractor and two (usually kids) working the wagon. A bale would inch out rear chute of the baler accompanied by the unforgettable rhythm of the piston compressing the next load—and when it came close enough to the edge of the wagon, you would lean out, swing your hayhook, and jerk the bale (around 50 lbs) over the 3 foot gap. All the while trying not to lose your footing as the wagon lurched along. Once you had it on board, you’d toss the hook to your companion, carry the bale to the back of the wagon, and stack it. There was a particular method of alternating the layers so the stack remained tight up to around six feet high. Getting that last layer on meant heaving the bale over your head.

Once the wagon was two-thirds full, there was no room for two kids so (in strict rotation. . .) one could hop off and have a break until it was time to drive the wagon to the barn where another set of kids were running the elevator, loading and stacking hay in the tops of the barns. If working the wagons was hot, at least you were in the open; unloading bales from the elevator in the top of a sweltering, airless barn was torment. Had Dante grown up on a farm, he would certainly have worked this particular activity into The Inferno.

We baled mostly timothy and alfalfa—sweetly scented, almost narcotic when you drove the sickle-bar mower through the fields or raked the dried grass into windrows once the dew was off it.  Baling straw after the winter wheat had been harvested was less evocative and more punishing—already dry, it held the dust generated by the combine, and the compressed sides of the bales rasped flesh from your forearms. Even in August you wore gloves and long-sleeved shirts. Everyone hayed together, in a mad rush between storms. You’d spend a day cutting and while that field dried, you’d move to another, then back to the first for raking and baling if the weather held. We’d do my grandfather’s fields, then my uncles, then ours—big crews, kids and men. Everyone ate together too, and a young boy could learn a lot of things that weren’t covered in school. I remember being alarmed the first time I met a grown up, one of my uncle’s men, who couldn’t read or write. It was as shocking as coming across a torn up snake in a bale. The world was full of surprises.

This suggestive power of grass is one of its legacies—level fields of waving grain, uniform, seemingly endless, offer abundance and promise a sort of grace bestowed by nature, a gift. It hides nothing, all is open for inspection— you can relax in its presence. Unlike purple mountains majesty, grass is neither heroic nor aristocratic. Shortly after Walt Whitman opens his astonishing “Song of Myself” he brings in the grass– “I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass./ Houses and rooms are full of perfumes. . .” For him, grass is the ‘journey-work of stars’, a ‘delicate miracle’ in which we read a cipher of ourselves in the vast new Republic he celebrates. Grass is the ultimate democracy, the ‘uniform hieroglyphic’ that sprouts and spreads according to a logic we are not privy to. In Whitman’s eyes, we too are grass. Caring well for it may indeed be the best form of self-preservation.

Lewis and Clark, Elk, & an upturned Datsun

Blog, Outreach, wildlife

From 1990-1993, I studied Roosevelt elk in a 900 sq. mile area of the Oregon Coast Range near Coquille and Myrtle Point.  Twenty-nine elk were temporarily tranquilized by darting them from a wild-flying helicopter, and then fitted with radio-collars so that I could track them with a radio-receiver. The intent of the study was to determine if roads and vehicle traffic altered elk habitat use.  For 14 months, I followed the animals and noted their locations and became familiar with some of their habits. Despite seeing them almost daily, every elk encounter was an uplifting moment in my life. These impressive animals with their large bodies, long legs, horse-like snouts, and white rumps always made me smile.  Perhaps that inward happiness was an evolutionary emotion, inherited from a hunter-gatherer who smiled when elk were nearby because these animals represented food, shelter, clothing, and tools.  Most of us have little contact with such large, wild free-ranging mammals like elk so I suspect my smile was also part of the amazement of encountering big wild things.

I learned much from the elk that I tracked with my beeping receiver and hand-held antenna. I discovered that despite their size that they were adept at hiding and moving silently through a forest.  Once will tracking an elk in an old growth forest, I paused next to a 200 year Douglas-fir to adjust my radio-receiver and collect my bearings.  I peered up and noticed a rhododendron branch moving under another tree 25 feet from where I was standing.  An elongated nose pushed through the bush and the elk that I was tracking stared at me for a few seconds and then silently withdraw back into the brush.  If I had not looked up at that moment, I would never have seen or heard the animal.

The members of the Lewis and Clark expedition ate a lot of wild game.  Some suggest that each member of the expedition consumed 7-9 lbs of meat a day when game was available.  A tally of the animals killed for food during the journey suggested that deer (1,001 animals) and elk (375 animals) were the most common sources for meat, but they also ate a fair share of bison (227), big-horned sheep (35), grizzly bears (23), dogs (190) and many other various and sundry creatures along the expedition’s route.  Apparently, when more flavorful items were not available, they occasionally munched on a few eagles, crows, muskrats, gophers and marine mammals.  The members of the expedition, according to the journals, liked to harvest elk because they were often plentiful and large. Like Lewis and Clark’s men, elk spend a lot of time searching and consuming food.  They can neatly clip a leaf from a tree or a blade of grass from a meadow.  I frequently encountered them on the edges of clear-cuts during frosty mornings in early spring feeding on the new shoots of forbs and grasses.

“this senery already rich pleasing and beatiful was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe, deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be compre[hend]ed at one view to amount to 3000.”  ~ From the Journal of Meriwether Lewis, Sep. 17, 1804

Elk or wapiti (Cervus Canadensis) is the largest deer species in North America.  They have an even number of toes like camels, goats and cattle on each foot, and a four-chambered stomach that allows them to digest rough foods. In Europe the moose is called elk.  Wapiti in Europe refers to red deer and many thought that North American elk were just a subspecies of red deer. However, some recent DNA analysis suggests that elk and red deer are likely a separate species.  It was thought that up to six subspecies of elk roamed across North America during the time of Euro-American settlement, but today only 4 remain including two, Rocky Mountain elk (C. elaphus nelsoni) and Roosevelt elk (C. elaphus roosevelti), that range into Oregon. However, recent genetic studies suggest that all the American subspecies are likely only one subspecies (C. canadensis canadensis).  Apparently, ancient ancestors of modern elk browsed in the grasslands of North American during the Miocene. Elk survived the massive extinctions during the Pleistocene that were perhaps caused by a combination of environmental factors and the evolution of human hunting technology, and like bison remained abundant in North American until Europeans settled into farms and towns.  Prior to the arrival of Euro-American settlers, elk were widely distributed in Oregon. They almost did not survive the market hunters of the 1800s in Oregon (and elsewhere) who severely diminished elk herds and caused the Oregon Legislature to enact protections for remnant populations.  Through some active transplanting and legal protections, elk populations have rebounded in many areas of Oregon.

Native Americans loved elk and the astonishing benefits that they provided such as food, clothing, hides for shelters, horns (for digging sticks, knives, etc) and incorporated many connections to elk in their cultural practices and spiritual histories.

Most days in the field were pretty routine, but occasionally a day would be memorable. One evening during my early weeks in the field, I was descending from the Coast Range near Coos Bay and slowly hugging the right steep embanked edge of a narrow gravel logging road in my pick-up, knowing that occasionally logging trucks roared up and down these roads on their way to deliver or pick-up recently felled trees.  No logging trucks that day, but instead a fast-moving small red Datsun car that whipped around a blind corner in front of me heading straight towards my truck before it turned sharply to the right and careened over a 200 foot embankment. I paused for a second with my heart thumping, and then leaped out of the truck and rushed to the edge of the cliff.  The car was upturned in a thicket of shrubs a few hundred feet below.  I heard the occupants scream something about getting a baby out before I slid down the embankment to the car.  Two adults crawled out of the windows and I helped them un-strap a toddler that was hanging upside down restrained by his seat-belt.  No injuries but the parents were bruised and shaken.

The summer that I started my field work was exceptionally dry, and by fall the forest was closed to the general public because of fire danger.  The animals seemed to sense that they would not be bothered by humans or their vehicles so until the rains came, I often encountered elk bedded along grassy road sides, bobcats with beautiful spotted cream and russet fur sitting in the middle of the logging roads, and an occasional black bear loitering at intersections.  Elk occasionally come down into the Willamette Valley.  Sometimes they knock over fences and browse newly planted trees or crops to the chagrin of landowners.  One early November day, Becca and I were hiking along a marsh trail on Finley Refuge and rounded a bend in the pathway.  In a nearby field the fog hovered close to the ground.  An elk herd was walking through the meadow, but all we could see was an occasional head that dipped in and out of the fog.  We turned to each other and smiled.