Families and friends of all ages are welcome to join us for a Twilight Walking Tour of Horseshoe Lake. This 236 acre floodplain property is located on the east bank of the Willamette River between Corvallis and Albany.
On this mostly flat and leisurely walk, we will explore a mix of habitats including wetlands, prairie, and riparian forest as we look and listen for birds, beavers, and pond turtles who all find food, water, shelter and room to roam in this beautiful place.
The walk will be under three miles, mostly along a mowed access road with some uneven footing at times. Our walk leaders will be Kendra Callahan from Greenbelt Land Trust and Brome McCreary, Wildlife Biologist with the US Geological Survey.
Western pond turtle at Harkens Lake.
Naturalist Lisa Millbank has been working for Greenbelt this summer conducting nest surveys for Western pond turtles. These shy creatures of wetlands, sloughs, streams and ponds are on the decline and Greenbelt is among the many organizations in Oregon and Washington working to identify and restore the habitat they need to make a comeback. We asked Lisa to share some of her knowledge about the turtles and her experience searching for their nests.
Life’s not easy for western pond turtle eggs and hatchlings. Female turtles dig nests into sandy or gravelly soil, but turtle eggs are a feast for striped skunks, coyotes, raccoons and other native predators capable of sniffing out and digging up the nests. When the quarter-sized hatchlings emerge from the surviving nests, they must evade more predators like otters, herons and mink.
Western pond turtles evolved alongside these native predators, but now they contend with an array of new problems. Bullfrogs and bass are introduced predators that eat young turtles. Western pond turtles must compete with introduced red-eared sliders from the southeastern US. As they walk slowly over land to disperse to new places or to find nesting sites, they are killed by cars. Agricultural practices can destroy nests or eliminate nesting habitat, and dense stands of invasive plants can smother the sunny, open places turtles need for nesting.
And as if those problems weren’t enough, recently, a novel fungal pathogen was isolated from ulcerative lesions on western pond turtles’ shells. Western pond turtle populations have disappeared entirely from many sites and have declined overall, and the species is now considered critically sensitive by the Oregon Natural Heritage Program. In Washington, they are listed as endangered, with only six remaining populations.
Greenbelt Land Trust has three properties with known populations of western pond turtles: Little Willamette, Harkens Lake and Horseshoe Lake. All three sites have undergone nest monitoring for three years so that nesting sites can be identified, preserved, enhanced or created. More than 60 nests have been identified, most of which had been dug up by predators. The broken eggshells left behind can be used to identify the turtle species, so the number of native western pond turtle nests vs. introduced red-eared slider nests can be estimated. Our other imperiled native turtle species, the western painted turtle, hasn’t been found at these sites.
In the 3-year monitoring period, about 75% of the identifiable nests were western pond turtle nests. There are quite a few nests that can’t be identified, either because the nest is intact, (we don’t dig up the eggs to identify them) or the predator that dug up the nest didn’t leave any eggshells. We don’t know for sure, but it may be that coyotes are the ones who gobble down eggs, shell and all, so that no identifiable shell pieces remain.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and Bonneville Power Administration have promoted and funded restoration and protection of nesting habitat, as well as a captive rearing program at the Oregon Zoo which has had success rearing and releasing turtles into suitable protected habitat. Turtle nest monitoring on Greenbelt properties provides some of the information we need to plan for enhancing specific areas of turtle nesting habitat, and we are beginning to plan for this process.
Want to learn more, and find out how you can help? The Oregon Native Turtle Working Group would love to hear from you!
Please join us for this special walk at Horseshoe Lake — which is not open to the public — led by Greenbelt Stewardship Director, Matt Blakeley-Smith. This walk will explore the beauty of the land as well as our conservation work, restoring habitat for wildlife, native fish and chinook salmon. Recently, Greenbelt engaged in earthmoving work at Horseshoe Lake – an oxbow of the Willamette River — to remove two farm roads that were preventing the flow of water limiting refuge for juvenile salmon from river flooding.
Getting their feet wet: Intel and other big firms begin to fund Willamette River restoration work
BENNETT HALL Corvallis Gazette-Times
Oct 6, 2019
“It’s a hot day in late July, and Matt Blakely-Smith is leading a tour of the Greenbelt Land Trust’s latest restoration project at Horseshoe Lake, a 236-acre piece of former farm property that wraps around a bend in the Willamette River between Corvallis and Albany.
The nonprofit environmental group has brought in a local excavating firm to take out two raised farm roads that form a dam across the arms of Horseshoe Lake, a cut-off oxbow that once was part of the Willamette mainstem… read the full story here.”
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.
