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
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…”.
