Just before dawn one day in early May, 1989 I struggled out of my tent, grabbed my headlight and walked to the first listening point of a survey line in a valley of the Coast Range near Fall City. I could make out the trilling notes of a Swainson’s Thrush and the emerging sounds of many other birds as they responded to the coming dawn. As the sky brightened, I could hear, faintly to the west, a series of faint “keer” calls and peered expectantly up at the towering canopy of ancient 400-500 year-old Douglas-fir trees. Soon the keer calls increased in number and volume and a pair of black bullet-shaped birds sped through openings in the upper canopy accompanied by “whirr” sounds from their rapid wing-beats. The pair of Marbled Murrelets was soon followed by others and I counted 30 distinct keer calls during the morning survey. This morning was my first in the Valley of the Giants, a small stand of old growth conifers in heart of the Oregon Coast Range. The Valley of the Giants is a remnant of an era of ancient and giant Douglas fir trees that historically covered many valleys in the Coast Range and survived periodic seasonal fires because the forests were protected within a geographic gradient of rain and more rain that often exceeded 180 inches a year. The previous evening I had left Corvallis in my 1980s vintage ford sedan borrowed from the Oregon State University Motor Pool, and followed sketchy directions and topographic maps down a maze of rutted dirt logging roads south of Fall City, motored cautiously through the abandoned mill town of Valsetz with its many broken and blacken tree stumps in the drained town lake and turned right on a one lane, more- rutted road that bordered the Siletz river until I reached an area where bent over alder saplings covered the road like green leafy umbrellas. I continued on, holding my breath that the road was still passable, and eventually emerged into the Valley of the Giants. This survey was the first for this elusive sea bird in the Valley of the Giants. I spent many more mornings in this remote, rain-drenched valley during the spring and summers of 1989 and 1990.
There were a number of research technicians combing the Coast Range and surveying forests to detect the presence of Marbled Murrelets in 1989 and 1990. We worked for Kim Nelson, a pioneer in the study of this amazing bird, and an ornithologist at Oregon State University. In 1989, Kim coordinated the first formal surveys of Marbled Murrelets in Oregon. No nests of this elusive bird had been located in Oregon so one objective of her study was to locate nests if possible. A nest tree was finally located in the Five Rivers areas near Alsea. The nest was found by happenstance with one of Kim’s assistants observing the silent nest exchange where one of the adults entered the canopy of the nest tree at dawn after a night of foraging on the ocean and switched places with the other incubating adult who returned to forage for their ocean food. Marbled Murrelets locate their nests often in the thick moss of large limbs of old growth conifers high in the forest canopy. These sites may be considerable distances from their ocean foraging habitats. With their football-shaped bodies and long narrow, pointed wings they fly at awesome speeds that exceed 60 mph. Unfortunately the large Douglas fir with the nest site was located adjacent to an active timber harvest so the U.S. Forest Service was informed of the nest location and agreed to temporarily suspend the logging work, and they had some of the upper management of the Siuslaw National Forest observe the nest exchange. I remember the research assistants lying on their backs on the ground comfortably staring up at the nest limb from their prone positions. An adult did fly into the nest that morning and the exchange was over in seconds.
The next year another nest was located in the Valley of the Giants and a rotating shift of field assistants camped out in the Valley to observe the progress of the nest. Kim hired a tree climber, Paul, to scale a nearby (to the nest) tree to take photos of the incubating bird. We swam in the Siletz during hot summer afternoons, occasionally foraged for blackberries, and roamed through stands of 500 year old giants. One late night, I was awakened by the snorting, heavy breathing and rustling of a band of elk as they slowly passed close by my tent in the dark forest.
