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Inspiring and supporting voluntary stewardship of Marys River Watershed

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Archives for November 2014

Pacific Lamprey Decline Steeply

November 24, 2014

Jeremy Monroe, Freshwaters IllustratedAncient, eel-like fish plays crucial role in river ecology

“Lampreys are delightfully bizarre fish — and vastly underappreciated for the role they play…in ecosystems.” Center for Biological Diversity

Pacific lampreys are ancient animals, emissaries from the Paleozoic era. For 500 million years, these eel-like fish evolved and adapted, inhabiting the Columbia River and its tributaries in numbers too vast to count. In the past century, however, these tenacious survivors have been on a steep slide toward extinction.

For too long, lampreys have been overlooked, overshadowed by the majestic Chinook that shares its waters. The lowly lamprey is, admittedly, an oddity of nature. Blind and nocturnal in their early years, juvenile lampreys leave snaky tracks on the river bottom when foraging at night — their only visible sign after disappearing again into the sediment at daybreak. After migrating to sea, where they grow from pencil-length to yardstick-length, they return upstream to spawn. With powerful suction cups for mouths, they can climb waterfalls by repeatedly sucking onto the slippery rock face and jumping upward, sometimes ascending hundreds of vertical feet. They also use their suckers to pick up and move large stones to build their redds (spawning nests). Another ancient feature: the lamprey has no jaw. In fact, it has no bones at all. Without bony skeletons, their bodies can swell and shrink to withstand the vagaries of life cycle and food supply. They can plump up hugely to accommodate an egg sac of 100,000. And they can shrivel down to practically nothing when food is scarce.

This biological bizarreness may have blinded humans to the ecological importance of these creatures — at least until recently. As Pacific lamprey populations have plunged, scientific interest has risen, according to Carl Schreck of Oregon State University.

“Thirty-five years ago when I started my career, there were zero papers on lamprey presented at meetings of the American Fisheries Society,” says the fisheries biologist. “These days, there are whole symposiums on lamprey.”

Now scientists have turned their attention toward the Marys River. As part of a three-year study in the Willamette River Basin, a team led by Schreck and OSU research biologist Lance Wyss is conducting surveys to estimate abundances of lamprey and characterize their habitat in the Marys mainstem, as well as other tributaries of the Willamette River. Of these, the Marys shows the lowest number of redds from spawning surveys. “There appears to be a shortage of spawning habitat in the Marys,” Wyss suggests, but acknowledges that it is too early in the study to say for sure.

Spawning habitat in many Northwest rivers, including the Marys, was lost last century when the streams were channelized (straightened) to reduce flooding on farmlands. Diminished were the curves and eddies where waters pooled, where silts and sands settled, and where fish rested. Without this natural “channel complexity,” a river’s fast-flowing waters scour out the cobbles and gravel beds that lamprey need for egg-laying. These cobbles and gravel beds happen to be the same ones salmon need for their egg-laying.

But spawning beds are only part of the picture of lamprey decline. To uncover other factors harming the fish, the researchers are looking at pharmaceuticals accumulating in sediments, industrial chemicals polluting streams, dams blocking passage upstream — basically “the whole shebang,” in Schreck’s words. “Whatever’s bad for lamprey is bad for salmon, and vice versa,” he observes.

This mutualism might seem contradictory, given that lamprey are parasites that attach themselves to salmon and suck their blood (another trait that fails to endear lamprey to humans). But ecosystem dynamics are always infinitely more complex on deeper analysis than they are at first glance. Turns out, lampreys are scrumptious, fat-filled delicacies for salmons’ principal predators. A sea lion, for instance, will eat 30 lampreys for every salmon it devours, according to Schreck and Wyss.

The ancient lamprey holds a place of high honor for another ancient population: the tribes that sustained themselves for countless generations on the Columbia River Plateau and along the watersheds that are drained by the mighty river. Lamprey, which once ran thick in the swift waters, were a critical food source between salmon runs. The tribes called lamprey “the food of the hunger months,” Schreck says. It is these tribes — the Umatilla, the Warm Springs, the Grand Ronde, the Siletz — that are spearheading much of the lamprey research through the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.

Filed Under: News

Back From the Brink

November 24, 2014

The tiny Oregon chub makes a big comeback

McKenzie River Oregon ChubThere’s a species of minnow that teetered on the brink of extinction. Hardly anyone noticed — except a handful of fisheries biologists determined to save the fish, known as the Oregon chub.

Now, the chub is back. Two decades after the chub landed on the Endangered Species List, it once again swims throughout the Willamette River Basin in healthy numbers.

Back when the Willamette River and its tributaries wandered across the landscape in gentle curves and complex braids, the Oregon chub was plentiful. In those days, the rivers freely topped their banks when Oregon’s rains raged, filling marshes and regenerating wetlands. The chub thrived in those slack waters, which were filled with aquatic vegetation and cover for hiding and spawning. Tens of thousands of the sardine-sized fish flashed silvery in the quiet waters of beaver ponds, in the slow channels of oxbows, and in the rich habitats of backwater sloughs all the way from Oregon City to Oakridge.

McKenzie-River-Oregon-ChubBut as the early settlers began to farm the fertile floodplains, to dam and dike and drain, to coerce the free-flowing waters to stay within the bounds of man-made channels, the chub’s native habitat shrunk. At the same time, non-native species like large-mouth bass, sunfishes and bullheads were invading the river and its tributaries, eating the little fish and out-competing them for habitat. By 1992, the Oregon chub was officially declared endangered.

Thanks to the all-out efforts of biologist Paul Scheerer and his colleagues at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and Oregon State University, the chub has rebounded in the Willamette Basin, including the Marys River drainage. To rebuild the populations, the scientists introduced the chub into new reaches of the river system, often on private lands under voluntary “Safe Harbor” agreements with landowners. They also discovered new populations in places where the chub had never been documented before. Several ponds at Finley National Wildlife Reserve hold the core populations in the Marys River Watershed.

In 2010, its status was upgraded from “endangered” to “threatened.” The hope is to take the fish off the list altogether.

That isn’t to say all is well for the tiny fish.

“Individual populations remain at risk due to the loss of suitable habitat and the continued threats posed by the proliferation of non-native fishes, illegal water withdrawals, accelerated sedimentation, and potential chemical spills or careless pesticide applications,” writes Scheerer and co-authors Brian Bangs and Shaun Clements in a recent report.

Filed Under: News

Planting Seeds: Staff Profile

November 24, 2014

kathleen

Kathleen Westly grows trees and kids

It’s a late-winter Saturday at Fern Road Farm in Philomath. Squalls are spitting rain, leapfrogging across the landscape with tepid snatches of sun. Along the Marys River, a crew of volunteers is hard at work planting seedlings and building beaver barriers to restore lost vegetation. Kathleen Westly, her hair tucked inside her trademark blue felt hat, is showing the volunteers how to construct wire cylinders to protect the tiny trees from gnawing teeth.

Watching Westly in her rubber boots and work gloves slinging bundles of bamboo poles and bails of chicken wire, it’s hard to picture her in the tailored suits she wore in her previous career as an account executive for Xerox. It’s hard to imagine her in pumps and matching briefcase, negotiating million-dollar deals for “Big Eight” accounting firms in places like Southern California and the industrial Midwest.

“The first time I walked up to Chicago Board of Trade building — this venerable old building that’s a historic landmark in the city — I remember feeling like Dorothy,” she says. “I thought, ‘I’m not in Kansas anymore.’”

Westly’s “Kansas” was, in fact, the Pacific Northwest, where she grew up tramping forests, mountains and beaches on family camping trips. When she looks back on her childhood, what comes to mind most vividly is the vegetation: Pacific dogwood and Indian paintbrush. Coast pines sculpted by sea winds. Madrone wrapped in ribbons of papery red bark. Hemlock draped in lacework of fine green needles. Wild huckleberries, plump and purple, on the pre-blast slopes of Mount St. Helens.

It’s not surprising, then, that she eventually donated her tailored suits and “those ridiculous shoes” to Goodwill and returned to Oregon with her husband to raise their three children. Nor is it surprising that trees and landscapes and streams sit at the heart of her new work as Education and Riparian Planting Coordinator for the Marys River Watershed Council.

“I always felt like I lacked a sense of purpose at Xerox,” says Westly, who earned degrees in history and business administration at Lewis & Clark College after graduating from Hillsboro High School.

Back in the Northwest, she and her family are making a life on 14 acres with a vegetable garden (planted with lots of kale, chard and winter squash) and four pigs (so her kids wouldn’t think “meat comes on a Styrofoam tray”). The clan includes Copper, the border collie (who herds everything from pigs to flotillas of river rafts), and Shadow, the cat (so named because she chased her shadow as a kitten). Raising children, harvesting food and caring for animals have taken Westly a long way toward a sense of purpose. Helping to found Muddy Creek Charter School after the closure of Inavale helped, too. So did serving on the board of Logos House (now defunct), a Christian studies center for college students, offering courses in such topics as wisdom literature, Earth keeping and the writings of C.S. Lewis.

Her spiritual life manifests strongly in her ministrations to the Earth. “We humans are creatures of place,” she says. “I believe we are meant to be stewards of what we have been given.”

Education and restoration are constant themes in Westly’s life. So her twin roles at the Council not only complement each other perfectly, but also complete her sense of purpose. One week, she’ll be demonstrating beaver barrier construction to Oregon State science majors down at the Marys River. The next week, she’s leading a fidgety band of fifth-graders as they touch their first garter snake, paddle their first canoe, plant their first willow or pull their first weed. “I love it, love it, love it when I see kids engaged with the land and the animals in the watershed,” she says. “It’s super-gratifying.”

 

Filed Under: News

Where Butterflies Thrive

November 15, 2014

Tour Group

FendersBlueButterfly_Wren_ FleckHardingPlanting Wildflowers and Freeing Oak Bringing Back Prairie Habitat

“There’s one!” calls a tall guy in an olive-drab raincoat. Slowly, gingerly, several members of the group step through the wet wildflowers toward the place where he’s pointing. There sits a tiny butterfly, no bigger than an inch from wingtip to wingtip. Digital cameras emerge from jacket pockets to capture the pale, bluish insect, nearly camouflaged on a pale, bluish blossom, the Kinkaid’s lupine, upon which the butterfly depends for sustenance throughout its lifecycle.

The tiny winged creature is a member of an endangered species — the Fender’s blue butterfly — newly emerged from its pupa and collecting nectar on a wildflower that is itself becoming more and more scarce.

Getting a glimpse of the rare butterfly is a testament to the success of a long-term, multiagency project to restore native grasslands in the rural community of Wren. For the 15 people taking the Watershed Council’s Memorial Day prairie restoration tour, the Fender’s blue sighting confirms the soundness of the presentations by scientists, landowners and local consultants who are on hand to show off the results of nearly a decade of restoration efforts in the gently rolling hills along the Marys River. The multi-phase project — led by the Watershed Council and the Oregon Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in collaboration with a number of landowners, Oregon State University and other partners — aims to reclaim the oak woodlands and flower-studded grasslands that have been lost to agriculture, fire suppression and conifer encroachment over the past 150 years.

“Huge Changes” Afoot

Kate McGee has seen “huge changes” on the acreage where she and Scott Lesko have been “freeing” oaks, eradicating thistle, and planting lupine since 2008. “We’ve seen things we’ve never seen here before, like acorn woodpeckers,” she says. “I saw an Ana’s swallowtail lay an egg on a lomatium (a native wildflower).”

McGee stands beside the meadow listening as Lesko tells the prairie tourists the couple’s personal restoration story: cutting dozens of Douglas firs to let sunlight reach the native white oaks. Spraying harmful invasive weeds that were choking off wildflowers. Hovering over the reclaimed meadow with the anxious concern of a new parent. She looks at the blue flags dotting a stand of fescue to mark the lupine starts and thinks about how far she and Lesko have come under the Watershed Council’s guidance.

“The Kincaid’s looks like it’s really settled in,” she says with satisfaction. “I feel fortunate to be a part of this.”

Sowing Wild Seeds

Henry Storch is a familiar presence in Wren, traveling the back roads in a dusty truck advertising his farrier service. But shoeing horses is just one of his trades. He keeps bees, too. And he sells native seeds. He knows wildflowers backwards and forwards, which puts him in high demand for the restoration projects underway in Wren.

Walk around Wren with Storch – whose grandmother taught him Latin at age 4 — and within minutes he’ll have your head spinning with flowers, bees, and random bits of horticultural information: Rose checkermallow (“a nice native”). Callicordis (“primo nectar for the Fender’s and the Taylor’s checkerspot”). English plantain (“the principle host for the Taylor’s). Camas (pretty basic). Bombus mixus (“a cavity nester”). Wyethia (“native sunflower”). Vetch (non-native, but functional for pollinators. Bombus Californicus. Lupinus organus (“a hybrid species with a really stinky smell).

As manager of the Watershed Council’s Nectar Network project, he has sown thousands of seeds in dozens of meadows. One of these meadows sits next to Lumos Winery off Cardwell Hill Road. Formerly owned by Lumos, the meadow was sold to Benton County in 2007 to help save the Fender’s blue. This critical habitat is home to one of the biggest remaining populations of the butterfly.  Based on studies suggesting that the Fender’s blue is hesitant to fly into shaded woodlands, the Watershed Council has taken out stands of conifers that divide one meadow from another. Creating corridors from one grassland to another creates a more robust population of butterflies with greater genetic diversity, explains Karen Fleck-Harding, the landowner outreach coordinator for the Council. Adds Storch: “We have these little pockets of habitat, but they’re not that valuable if they don’t get connected together.”

Wildlife Abounds

Fleck-Harding points out a cluster of finger-like foliage in the dewy meadow. “The Kinkaid’s lupine holds a drop of water in the center of its leaves like a crystal,” she says. Wild iris is growing there there, too, along with a stridently yellow wildflower called Oregon sunshine. Wild strawberries peak from the greenery, red and plump and irresistible to the humans walking among them. “Strawberries surviving out here means there’s not a lot of competition from tall grasses,” says Fleck-Harding. “It’s an indicator of a healthy meadow.”

Among the landowners Fleck-Harding has worked with is Susan Smith. Every day, Smith walks out to the field where she and her husband are waiting for the Fender’s blues to find their newly bloomed lupine. She hasn’t seen one yet this year. But she has seen more wildlife since they started their restoration, including pileated woodpeckers on Doug firs de-limbed to create oak habitat, now serving as wildlife snags. “We used to have just a thicket out here,” says Smith. “Now we have two nice oak woodlands. It’s really pretty. It was exciting to find out that we have something worth saving and preserving — that we could contribute to saving the butterflies and help protect the area for years to come.”

Filed Under: News

Corvallis Mill Race: Past, Present, Future

November 15, 2014

culvert

1. Old Wetland Rivulet Dug Out for Flour Power

Chinese Laborers Dig Channel and Build Dam

If you drive along Hwy 99 through Corvallis’s “South Town,” you might have a hard time imagining how the landscape looked when European settlers arrived 150-plus years ago. But if you can mentally erase the asphalt and power lines, the strip malls and subdivisions, you might start to form a picture of that long-ago landscape.

Back then, South Town was a wetland. The triangular lowland was snugged between the Marys and the Willamette, its wet-prairie vegetation — camas, toad rush, tufted hairgrass, coyote thistle — spreading southwest to the riparian forests of the Marys and its tributary Muddy Creek.

When the Marys flooded its banks, as it did several times a year, the overflow coursed across the prairie, forming channels and rivulets throughout the drainage. One of those natural channels caught the eye of an early entrepreneur, prominent Benton County businessman J.C. Avery. He had plans for that waterway. When staking out Avery’s land claim in 1845, the surveyor labeled the channel a “mill race.” What had long been an ephemeral channel, a seasonal “ditch” that filled with water during high flows (giving refuge to fish during flooding) and dried up in the summer, suddenly became a business asset. The channel officially became the Mill Race, turning the waterwheel that powered Avery’s saw mill at the confluence of the Marys and the Willamette near the current site of Hollingsworth & Vose (formerly Evanite Fiber Corporation).

“Water flowing down a ditch from two miles up the Marys River provided the power that gave South Corvallis its start as an industrial center,” wrote Corvallis historian Kenneth Munford a 1991 edition of the Gazette-Times.

Eventually, the saw mill gave way to a grist mill and then became a thriving, three-waterwheel flour mill owned by H.F. Fischer. A crew of Chinese laborers was hired to deepen and straighten the channel and to build an earthen dam across the Marys River about two miles upstream, near today’s Marysville Golf Course. The dam — which washed out several times over the years — “created a reservoir to keep constant the flow of water through the mill race,” Munford wrote.

Today, the Mill Race travels from its source in the Marys, under roadways and railroad trestles through a series of culverts, its banks hardened by concrete or snarled by blackberries and other invasive weeds, returning, finally, to its mother river just before it empties into the Willamette.

The Council is working to piece together the story of the Corvallis Mill Race. If you have information to share, please contact the Watershed Council online or call 541-758-7597.

2. Glimpses of an Urban Stream

Corvallis Mill Race Winds through South Town Mostly Unseen

By Lee Sherman, MRWC Board Member

On an overcast Saturday in March, I met up with Dave Eckert at the South Co-op for a first-hand look at the Corvallis Mill Race. Eckert, who leads the Water Action Team of the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition, had contacted the Council a few weeks earlier to say, “Hey, how about doing a story on the Mill Race for your newsletter?” My reaction was, “What Mill Race?” When I learned that it’s a 160-year-old urban channel running smack-dab through the center of South Corvallis, I wanted to go see it for myself.

Eckert led the way. From the co-op, we walked through the BMX Park on S.E. Chapman, where kids on dirt bikes zoom up and down packed-earth hummocks. Along the eastern edge of the track, a riparian corridor was growing thick with willow and underbrush, blocking the view of the stream from above. Holding onto a length of nylon rope that we had anchored to a tree, we half-slid down a steep embankment tangled with Himalayan blackberry. I saw deer tracks in the mud at my feet. At the bottom of the thicket ran a thin, brown trickle. This was the last leg of the Mill Race, which begins in the Marys River near the Cub Scout Lodge at the end of Allen Lane and, after flowing about two miles, re-joins the mainstem Marys just before it enters the Willamette at Shawala Point.

Next we headed upstream toward the headquarters of specialized glass-fiber manufacturer Hollingsworth and Voss, the very spot where the Mill Race originally powered a sawmill in the 1800s and later drove three waterwheels for Fischer Flouring Mills. We skirted around the factory’s chain-link fence and then dropped again to the stream bank south of the plant. We could see the stream flowing through rusty culverts under the roadway. On the banks, wild roses grew, their red hips bright against the dull day. Where Crystal Lake Drive crosses the stream, duckweed choked the bed.

On the bridge at Hwy 99, we stood and looked down at old bottles and bits of scrap lumber floating on the water. A few yards upstream, a pair of mallards swam. “Route 99 near Bridgeway floods during heavy storms,” Eckert told me. “That’s the point where lots of stormwater enters the stream from storm pipes draining all the development and roads to the north and south of that point. If we treated some of that stormwater onsite at each property, like the South Co-op has done, it would ease the localized flooding issues that people often blame on the stream itself.”

At Marysville Golf Course just south of Avery Park, we watched the Mill Race flow under an old railroad trestle. We turned around at this point and headed home. But MRWC board member Jeremy Monroe and another local environmental steward, Jay Thatcher, report that several years ago they walked all the way to the “uppermost reaches of the watercourse,” which they found to be densely overgrown. “At the end of the Mill Race near the Cub Scout lodge,” Thatcher said, “an old concrete abutment stands on the banks of the Marys River. We think it probably held the head gates of the Mill Race, which was dug in the 19th century.”

A Vision of Revival

Mill Race Draws Grassroots Interest

The Corvallis Mill Race has a colorful history. Dug along an existing marshy stream corridor in the 1800s by Corvallis town father J.C. Avery, the stream (sometimes dismissed as a “ditch”) was devised to divert water from the Marys River to Avery’s sawmill on the Willamette River. To keep the flow constant, a dam was built on the Marys. Later on, Chinese laborers deepened and straightened the channel to power a flour mill.

Today, both the dam and the mill are gone, but the Mill Race remains, passing under roads and rail lines in south Corvallis, then through the Hollingsworth & Voss industrial site (formerly Evanite). The original Mill Race drained directly into the Willamette, but several decades ago Evanite diverted its final segment into the Marys.

Colorful history aside, the Mill Race goes mostly unnoticed as it flows through South Town.  A torrent during the wet season, a trickle during the dry, it wends northeast from its headwaters near the Marysville Golf Course, passing through residential neighborhoods and commercial zones before rejoining the Marys not far from the Willamette. Most drivers cross the Mill Race on Hwy 99 without giving it a glance. A few scientific studies have been undertaken by local governments over the years, but the literature on the Mill Race remains thin.

In short, the Mill Race has been nearly invisible and, except when it was realigned in the mid-1980s, mostly ignored in the modern era.

But there’s a groundswell of interest bubbling up in the community. Homeowners who live along the stream are wondering about its water quality: Is it safe for kids to play in on a hot summer day? Nonprofits, including the Watershed Council and the Corvallis Sustainability Coalition, are seeking historical and contemporary information about vegetation and wildlife habitat, including fish passage and spawning. Watershed activists are puzzling over the Mill Race’s role in the storm water that sometimes floods the highway. Local businesses, graduate students, river ecologists and environmental writers are investigating the stream’s ebbs and flows, both literally and figuratively. Residents — tired of the trash that spoils the stream and mars the view — are organizing grassroots cleanups (see below).

Together, they are envisioning a cleaner urban stream — one that is safe for kids and pets and supports native foliage to stop erosion, shade the banks and cool the water for native fish. They’re exploring the feasibility of interpretive signage and trails. And they’re continuing to ask questions, for example: How many undocumented effluent pipes empty into the Mill Race, speeding up flow and volume during flood events? What is the cultural heritage of the stream to the First People of the region? What role does the Mill Race play in occasional flooding along Hwy 99?

“Right now, nobody feels that the Mill Race is part of their neighborhood or community life,” says David Eckert, Stream Action Team coordinator for the Sustainability Coalition. “There are a lot of folks hoping to spark a revival — a creek revival — of the Mill Race.”

The Council is working to piece together the story of the Corvallis Mill Race. If you have information to share, please contact the Watershed Council online or call 541-758-7597.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Mill Race

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101 SW Western Blvd, Suite 105
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