All posts by Jessica McDonald

Tortoises & Human History

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In 2006, Harriet, one of the few remaining members of the Galapagos tortoise subspecies Geochelone nigra porten, died in Australia.  The history of Harriet is a little vague but some suggest she was collected by Charles Darwin in 1835 during his great voyage on the HMS Beagle and taken back to Great Britain and eventually transported to Australia.  It was thought that Harriet was about 5 years old when she was abducted from one of the barren rocky shores of the Galapagos Islands. So that made Harriet 177 years of age when she passed away from heart failure in 2006.  She was miscast as Harry for 124 of the 177 years before they determined she wasn’t a male.  She lived through extraordinary world times.  Harriet was a young mature tortoise of 35 years when Lee road up to Appomattox Courthouse to effectively end a war that cost over 618,000 American lives.  When Royal Prince Ferdinand was shot down in the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, in an event that eventually precipitated a world conflict and claimed 15 million lives, Harriet was a middle-aged tortoise of 84 years.  She munched on greens and other vegetables and lived on as war raged across the globe a second time from 1939-1945, men walked on the moon in the late 1960s, and the Soviet Empire broke apart in the early 1990s.  She almost lived to celebrate the 200th birthday anniversary of her captor Darwin who died in 1882 when she was 52 years of age.  Harriet spent her last few years at the Australia Zoo where they celebrated her birthdays with a massive tortoise-shaped cake.

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.

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

An Unseen World

Blog, Outreach, Restoration

Back before the dot com age, the fastest way to vast riches (besides marrying an heirless aristocrat with a bad cough) was to land a piece of the spice trade. Pepper, in particular, was worth several times its weight in gold. Until relatively recently, most of it came from India’s Malabar region—and even in the 5th century it was so valuable that marauding Visigoths plaguing Rome demanded ransom in pepper. Pepper pulled Vasco da Gamma around the African horn, and pepper fuelled the first fires of mercantilism—if even only one of your ships came in with a cargo of the stuff, you were set up for generations.  But in addition to opening doors onto new geographical and economic horizons—pepper gave us the first glimpse into microscopic aquatic communities. Back in the 17th century, an unassuming Dutchman named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was investigating (as he thought) the secret of pepper’s unique flavour and heat, probably in hopes of finding some commercial advantage in distilling or concentrating its properties. Thinking there was some connection between its piquancy and the abrasive surface of the peppercorn itself, he soaked several corns in a pot of water to soften. And when he observed the broth with a very rudimentary microscope. . . . he saw little organisms zipping in and out of his field of vision. The water was alive with little somethings.  “They were incredibly small, nay so small, in my sight, that I judged that even if 100 of these very wee animals lay stretched out one against the other, they could not reach to the length of a grain of coarse sand.” I imagine at that point he lost his interest in pepper per se and probably his interest in soup for lunch.  Every subsequent liquid sample he observed housed similar animals in unimaginable numbers, obliviously carrying out their daily chores in their undisturbed universe.

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 9th 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.

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.

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.

American Beaver ~ A long history

Blog, Outreach, Restoration, wildlife,

Oregon has a very long and notable history with American beaver.   Two years ago John Zancancella, the BLM’s coordinator for paleontology in Prineville, stumbled upon some unusual rodent-like teeth while perusing an eroded patch of frozen ground near the John Day Fossil Beds.  The teeth were a molar and premolar (back teeth) from an ancient species of beaver that swam 7-7.3 million years ago in the creeks, ponds and rivers in grass-dominated landscapes occupied by “small camels, short-trunked elephants and shovel-tusked mastodons.”  The teeth are very similar to the molars and premolars found in modern beaver suggesting that the animal has changed little since the late Miocene.  The fossils are currently the oldest evidence of beaver in the New World and provide a window into the divergence of our Castor Canadensis and its Eurasian cousin, Castor fiber. However, this ancestral beaver lived in a world that was changing.  The earth’s climate was cooling and becoming more arid as carbon levels fell.  Entire families of animals, that were adapted to browsing on shrubs and trees, disappeared to be replaced by long-toothed, heavy-jawed grazing animals such as large camels and more fleet-footed and long-limbed horses that could consume the tougher carbon-fixing (C4) grasses dominating the landscapes in eastern Oregon.

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-18th 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 20th 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.

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 Power of Water

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A month ago we walked out in our wetland and saw a few inches of water collected in the deeper end where the cattails grow. The red-winged blackbirds with their liquid call were already in residence, and the marsh wrens (the reed canary grass chokes the stream beneath the berm offers them an easy nest) scolded, half-heartedly. But mainly we saw what wasn’t there—water. That, of course, has changed. The wet season has arrived in spades, as everyone along the Willamette knows.  Just a few days ago we tried to reach a stranded friend in both pick-up and canoe to little avail—the Mary’s wandered convincingly—inspecting the lower lands south of Philomath. . . through stock barns, yards, under marooned cars,  pooling in paddocks,  collecting in tunnel houses, and of course, using the roads. There’s something both exhilarating and disquieting about seeing a lake where kale grew the day before, or produce trucks nose to tail like ships of the line in an inland sea you know is only knee deep.  In an instant, everyone has a backyard wetland just where the swingsets stand.

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

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 20th,  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

Mountain Quail ….

Blog, Outreach, wildlife,

 

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.

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 19th and 20th 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.

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…”.