All posts by Jessica McDonald

Lean times …

Blog, wildlife

Outside, beyond the Christmas lights, the cookies and fireside snacks, the long season of short days sets in.  Leaves mat and blacken the ground, stars appear before bedtime, and frost etches bent grass in the fields. It’s a hungry time too—the easy seeds are gone, the berries a summer memory. Even the rosehips are blown, and the few remaining apples lie shredded in the weeds along the drive. I suppose birds make their peace with the season and its lean times, although more of their larder vanishes, irreplaceably, every year, pushed to the margins, paved or ploughed: and every year, there is less to lose. The geese at any rate are happy with the new grass and our penchant for golf courses and monoculture. But others, like those around our house, feed with a greater intensity this time of year, and have dropped all pretense; they wait impatiently at first light on low branches for me to hang the suet or replenish the sunflower seeds. The hawks know this too and pluck the unwary in mid-air, flying from behind the porch pillars. We have one especially bold and handsome Cooper’s hawk who sits on a post by the porch scanning the undergrowth for terrified towhees. But hummingbirds are the boldest (why don’t they go somewhere with flowers?), perhaps feeling the sharpest pinch. Especially on frosty mornings, when it’s scarcely light enough to tell one tree from its neighbor they zip out as I hang their nectar, and I find myself eye to eye with a pair of fearless Anna’s clicking impatiently for me to finish. It’s not a bad way to start the day.

 

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

Late Fall in the Valley …

Blog, Outreach, Properties, , , ,

Working on my computer, trying to complete paper work that I have neglected during our extended October summer ….   I keep looking up and out of my office window at the Willamette River and the rain and wind-blown leaves.   The dark overcast skies, brisk winds, and leaf colors seemed to have just  appeared.  I don’t remember any transition from the tee-shirt sunny days of working in my garden and hiking along forested trails to our late cool, fall rains and leaf raking.  Unlike some, I gravitate to our fall/winter weather.   I resemble my late golden retriever who used to settle comfortably by the fireplace, his nose pressed against the fire screen during the first fall rains and stayed there until the daffodils bloomed in early spring.  I love the summers in the mid-Willamette Valley with the rich blue skies, warm sun, beautiful gardens and hummingbirds, but I also need some time to sit and dream and that is what the fall and winter offers.  Becca and I prefer our late fall/winter walks to be along trails in broad meadows such as Bald Hill Farm or Fitton Green, in part because we like the contrast of colors that an overcast sky lends to the oaks and upland meadows, and in part because we like contemplating  open winter landscapes.

Nate and Rachel (my son and his lady friend) arrived a few days before Thanksgiving as the Valley was beset by late fall storms.  During their week in Corvallis, they walked everywhere never forsaking rain coats and always placing muddy shoes near the heat vents when they returned.   Nate grew up in Corvallis so expecting to walk in the rain is second nature.   Every day, they hiked trails either on MacDonald Forest, Oak Creek, Bald Hill or Finley Refuge.  On Thanksgiving Day after eating lots of food at Chris and Sarah’s house, most of the dinner group donned raincoats and boots and walked through their backyard and onto the Bald Hill Farm trail.  We walked down the trail that crosses Mulkey Creek skirting mud puddles and a few fallen branches.  Chris and I paused to discuss how, before the land was farmed, the Creek probably pushed water onto a large wetland in an adjacent field.  He thought the marsh could be easily restored and while he talks, I briefly imagine the presence of red-winged blackbirds perching on cattails in the spring.  While continuing our walk, I thought about my friend, Eve and Rob, who love the Mulkey Ridge Trail.  Eve and Rob arrived in Corvallis from Miami via Prescott and Santa Barbara a few years ago.  They are avid and passionate naturalists.  If I happen to be in the downtown Beanery at 11:00 am, there is a 99% chance of sitting down with them and discussing their backyard that is being transformed into a native plant garden or hearing about one of their birding trips to Central or South America or Isaac’s Tai-Chi class at Starker Art’s Park.  There is a 99% chance during the summer and fall that you will find their ancient red Land Rover parked at the Saturday Farmer’s Market and that they will be carrying a recently purchased bag of beautiful edible mushrooms.  Their photos of life along Mulkey Ridge (such as the gorgeous Calypso orchid, the female Douglas squirrel perched on a branch and shredding a pine cone, the large beautiful erect pileated woodpecker next to its tree cavity, and the community of mushrooms, lichens and ferns on a rotting log) are stunning and sublime.

Nate and Rachel are heading to the Coast a few days late because HWY 18 was closed by storm-blown trees.  They are going to hike the Cascade Head Trail from Knights Bridge Park, one of my favorite coastal walks.  Hiking through a steep conifer forest, you emerge onto spectacular headland coastal meadows that are being restored by the Nature Conversancy, in part to protect and enhance a community of rare Oregon silverspot butterflies and their primary host plant, the blue violet.  At the top of the headlands, if you are lucky and the fog is not obscuring the view, you are rewarded with an incomparable birds-eye view of the Salmon River estuary, the Oregon coastline and perhaps the resident elk herd foraging in one of the lower meadows.

Jessica asked the Greenbelt Staff to consider describing in a few words what they are thankful for during this Holiday season.   The most difficult part of considering that question is narrowing down the list. I think at the very top of my list is that I feel especially blessed to be able to live in a beautiful part of the world among a community of wonderful friends and neighbors.

Nature’s Gallery

Blog, Outreach, , ,

This time of year we live in the gallery—every turn shows nature lavishing on us its ironic exuberance, made all the more poignant because we know winter will soon slowly unpaint the scene. Shakespeare’s observation on this brilliant decline–   “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long” comes to mind, as does Hopkins’ “Million-fuelled, nature’s bonfire burns on.”  And it is glorious, there’s no question. We stop in our tracks at the sight of big leaf maples bursting into gold.  Miraculously, this all comes back to us year after year—or will, if we take care of the canvas. . . .

Out my window I see a catalpa (native, but not to here) metasequoia (another exotic, and ancient), ginko (practically a living fossil, lonely among these newer upstarts) and dove tree (Davidia. . .  ditto on the exotic) stretch the spectrum from yellow to crimson, and flame for weeks. But what we mostly have around our place are garrayanna oaks, which seem almost mute in comparison. Underachievers in the foliage pageant despite their girth and crown.  But it isn’t a beauty contest, or shouldn’t be—trees emerge from their particular environments not to enrich our aesthetic but in answer to a more fundamental calculus. Those garrayanna support colonies of acorn woodpeckers, flickers and brown creepers. By comparison, the ginko is yard-bling, not even singing for its supper.

Getting back to Shakespeare—we have just one spring, one fall to the seasons of our lives (sorry for the spoiler here), but nature soldiers on. So with each year we tend to look a little longer at these turnings, a little more closely, more appreciatively. If spring around here is a lesson in greens—the pale young leaves slowly overtaking the moss and lichens on the oaks, the dark firs providing a basso continuo to the melody of new fescue and orchardgrass—fall is a study in scarlet and gold.

Walk through the farmer’s market in late October—it’s nothing but scarlets and golds, an edible fall landscape. Take delicata squash. It’s been around a long time, and may have graced the tables of the pilgrims or at least subsequent generations, once they made the trek further west: vibrant, hearty, and redolent of what the good earth produces. (Apparently you can even wear them—check out at the 16th century painting by Giambattista Moroni (c. 1565) Portrait of a Widower and His Two Daughters—surely the younger daughter is wearing a delicata squash skirt. And her knowing smile suggests she’s just had one for supper—baked, with a pat of butter in the center—bought at the Saturday market from Gathering Together Farms). Unlike the rest of the rapidly fading fall pageant, delicata keep long after we’ve set the clocks back, loaded the woodbox,  and settled in for the rains.  They turn your plate into a September sunset, reminding you of where we’ve just been, asking “Are we not blessed indeed?”

Valley of Fires

Blog, Field Work, Outreach, Restoration, ,

Just before noon one day in late October, Claire, Jessica and I jumped into my 22 year-old Subaru and drove to Lupine Meadows, a 58 acre property bordering West Hills road at the south end of Bald Hill Farm.  Jeff Baker, the Greenbelt Stewardship Manager, had just called to say “it” was to begin. The “it” was a prescribed fire that Greenbelt was coordinating on part of Lupine Meadows to enhance the native upland prairie habitat.  The Greenbelt Land Trust purchased the Lupine Meadows property in 2005 to protect the existing populations of endangered Fender’s blue butterfly and its host plant, Kincaid’s lupine.

Willamette Valley prairies and fires are like floods and floodplains…there are long histories of connections, expectations and dependencies.  The Kalapuya people in the Willamette Valley ignited local fires to maintain favorite foods such as tarweed, camas, biscuitroot, and yampah. They also burned some prairies in late spring and fall to create lush meadows of succulent grasses with wonderful names such as blue wildrye, Roemer’s fescue, and Lemmon’s needle grass for elk and deer. In 1826 the great Scottish botanist/explorer David Douglas traveled  for 15 days through the Willamette Valley on his way to the Umpqua River and complained that there was “not a single blade of grass except on the margins of rivulets to be seen” because all was burned.  He worried that their horses had little fodder and game animals had abandoned the Valley.

Jessica, Claire and I park along the edge of the small hill that forms the northern end of Lupine Meadows and head toward the white wildland fire trucks that ring the lower end of the hill.  Jeff with his yellow hard-hat, fire-proof trousers and yellow thick long-sleeved shirt is stalking the parameter.  A half-dozen wildfire specialists from the Grand Ronde Tribe and USFWS are scattered across the burn site.  They mowed a 10 foot strip around the fire zone.  Several men in the interior of the fire line use back-pack drip-torches to ignite the dried grass and flower stalks. Another man follows a truck holding a hose snaking from a large water tank on the back of the truck and waters the perimeter to keep the fire from leaping into an adjacent area.  We are the tourist photographers, trying to stay out of way but fascinated with the event and determined to record all we can.  The fire crew is working uphill and as they get closer to the top more of the prairie catches fire…..flames create large columns of white smoke that rise high above the hill.  I take a picture of Jessica as she snaps a shot of Jeff.  Claire is crouched down below the grass stalks trying to get ground level photographs of burning grass.  I look across the road worried that the smoke might disturb the neighbors or obscure the road.  A yellow school bus drives by, the school children staring out the windows at the smoke with open mouths.

We, like our ancestors, have a love-hate relationship with fire.  Stephen J. Pyne,  my favorite fire historian, notes that the “Earth is a uniquely fire planet, and Homo sapiens a uniquely fire creature” who have “literally set about slowly cooking the earth.”  He believes that “many aboriginal tribes consider a land unburned a land uncared-for.”  However, industrial societies fear fire in part because we build our homes and schools in areas that evolved with fire and created vast forest plantations that exclude fire.  My father often stalked the rooms of our house late at night sniffing the air and worrying about smoke….remembering a friend who died in a dormitory fire when he was a cadet at Marion Military Institute.  Looking over our small fire on Lupine Meadows, I reflect on the way Pyne describes fire as a “creation of life” with a shared co-evolution.  For the past 1.5 million years fire has been intertwined with humans and their histories.  So maybe with our little Lupine fire we are just doing what comes natural to our DNA; clearing the land of last spring and summer’s remnants and starting anew with a desire to see new life and growth in the spring.

Why I live here …

Blog, Outreach,

 

In our long wandering years we dreamed of returning not just to the US but to the Willamette Valley. Human salmon returning to the river that gave them life (I can’t say native river since I was born in a different watershed—along the banks of the Mississippi. . .). For years we told our kids stories about fixing up an old farmhouse in the valley, getting a dog, a chainsaw, and some chickens. Somehow it happened—we rebuilt a 19th century schoolhouse (built by a freed slave—no mere metaphor) not far from Corvallis, got the chickens and the chainsaws, and with the help of another GLT member turned part of our field into a seasonal wetland. The geese are already wheeling overhead, and in a few weeks teal, mallard, and wood ducks will arrive. This valley draws us all. Not that it’s perfect. We could do with some fireflies, for example. And more lightning, at least in the wet months when we wouldn’t  have to worry about wildfires. And maybe snapping turtles.

The valley draws us and we change it. Where I grew up, change was slow—a new house or two every decade. The same creeks, the same hickory trees I grew up with still draw kids and quail. I walked to school past cypress my great grandfather planted, and my brother hunts morels in the bottom land under white pine we planted as kids. But here things are different—the valley nourishes change: housing developments sprout at every turn, fields yield pavement and parking. And this too is good and necessary, no doubt about it.  We shop at a store where cedars grew alongside a creek fifteen years ago. Dozens of families live in houses on the slopes across our wetland where oaks stood when we built our chicken shed. You can actually see the urban growth boundary—it’s where the houses stop. And perhaps this is good and proper. But we must move wisely. All lands are not equal –we run the show, but we are not the only stakeholders. Those other citizens—finny, feathery, too small to see and all lacking voices—depend on us. The bird species alone has doubled on our place since we returned our field to wetland. Land responds generously to water and silence, and both nourish us. As Carl Sandburg said of his own Illinois countryside, walking out into the margins of the farms and field near his home in Galesburg — “This is a proud place to come to, on a winter morning, early in winter.”  Whether our valley remains a proud place to come to is up to us.

– Seymour House, Greenbelt Land Trust Board