Snow-fog obliterated my view of Crater Lake itself (and much of the surrounding terrain) but I simply had to try — the park’s terrain and history are so fascinating!  Imagine a great volcanic mountain building and spewing and erupting —- until it empties itself of magma, and becomes hollow.  The great subsidence that followed propelled the “mountain” deep into the earth!  The collapsed crater now holds the lake, like ice-water in a stone bowl held up for the sky to sip.  I was disappointed by the weather but —- I think it was Confucius who said “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

View from the rim (which had been plowed open only for a short distance, to Discovery Point):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newberry_Volcano

http://www.fs.fed.us/r6/centraloregon/newberrynvm/index.shtml

The promised thunderstorm has finally arrived in the McKenzie District, rattling overhead.  The forest ridge is receding in a blue veil of rain, and the scarlet, thumb-sized hummingbird that thrummed outside my window all day is suddenly nowhere to be seen.  Sleeping dry beneath a maple leave, maybe?   I’m writing in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest library, watching sudden cascades of rainwater over-shoot gutters, self-sequestered with a big table and a wall of windows, yet easily distracted among dangling tangents of my own scribbled notes.  It’s been an amazing, whirl-wind Writer-in-Residence experience; tonight I’ll sleep in the forest, dreaming of owls and newts and alpine monkeyflowers no larger than my pinky-fingernail, almost ready to flower.  And I’ll tuck these poems away for a few weeks.  Perhaps they’ll germinate like squirrel-buried nuts while my attention is elsewhere.

A few resonant lines from recent readings, as I wrap up loose threads:

Barry Lopez (who has written about the Andrews Forest) from his essay “The American Geographies” in Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

… As a boy I felt a hunger to know the American landscape that was extreme; when I was finally able to travel on my own, I did so. Eventually I visited most of the United States, living for brief periods of time in Arizona, Indiana, Alabama, Georgia, Wyoming, New Jersey, and Montana before settling years ago in western Oregon.

The astonishing level of my ignorance confronted me everywhere I went. I knew early on that the country could not be held together in a few phrases, that its geography was magnificent and incomprehensible, that a man or woman could devote a lifetime to its elucidation and still feel in the end that he or she had but sailed many thousands of miles over the surface of the ocean. So I came into the habit of traversing landscapes I wanted to know with local tutors and reading what had previously been written about, and in, those places. I came to value exceedingly novels and essays and works of nonfiction that connected human enterprise to real and specific places, and I grew to be mildly distrustful of work that occurred in no particular place, work so cerebral and detached as to be refutable only in an argument of ideas.

These sojourns in various corners of the country infused me, somewhat to my surprise on thinking about it, with a great sense of hope. Whatever despair I had come to feel at a waning sense of the real land and the emergence of false geographies–elements of the land being manipulated, for example, to create erroneous but useful patterns in advertising–was dispelled by the depth of a single person’s local knowledge, by the serenity that seemed to come with that intelligence. Any harm that might be done by people who cared nothing for the land, to whom it was not innately worthy but only something ultimately for sale, I thought, would one day have to meet this kind of integrity, people with the same dignity and transcendence as the land they occupied. So when I traveled, when I rolled my sleeping bag out on the shores of the Beaufort Sea or in the high pastures of the Absaroka Range in Wyoming, or at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I absorbed those particular testaments to life, the indigenous color and songbird song, the smell of sun-bleached rock, damp earth, and wild honey, with some crude appreciation of the singular magnificence of each of those places. And the reassurance I felt expanded in the knowledge that there were, and would likely always be, people speaking out whenever they felt the dignity of the earth imperiled in these places.

William R. Jordan III., “Restoration and the Reentry of Nature” also from Finding Home: Writing on Nature and Culture from Orion Magazine. Edited by Peter Sauer.  (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992):

Ecological restoration is in the odd condition of being a practice but still not quite an articulated idea.  Yet, as a response to a problem it is full of promise.  (…….) The plan was to create here on this hillside overlooking Lake Wingra a sample of the great hemlock-hardwood forest that once covered thousands of square miles in the northern part of the state.  By the 1930s that forest had been destroyed, and the resulting slash fires, soil erosion, and economic devastation contributed to the great economic and ecological disasters of that decade.  Here, however, someone decided to try again.  Sugar maples and hemlocks were planted in the light shade under a stand of old oaks.  Today their crowns are beginning to join those of the taller, older trees overhead.  In summer this is now a shady spot under the maples, and the understory is thinning in places, becoming more like proper maple forest understory.  On a bright fall day the place glows in sunlight filtered through a golden crown of maples.

The woods is not natural.  It is not artificial. It simply defies these distinctions; it is both.

“This,” I think, remembering the line from A Winter’s Tale quoted by Frederick Turner in his essay “Cultivating the American Garden,” “is an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is nature.”

Nowhere is this art more evident to me that here on this hillside, walking under the trees of this planted forest.

Margaret Herring and Sarah Greene, from Forest of Time: A Century of Science at Wind River Experimental Forest. (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2007).

The canopy (studied from a gondola, dangling from the jib-arm of a giant crane that brings researchers 250 feet up, into the upper stories of the forest) was no longer seen as just a roof held up by wood. The Wind River canopy crane opened a world that is just beginning to reveal itself to scientists in the 21st century. (….) One of the first lessons scientists learned from their new vantage point was that the forest canopy was much more complex than they had imagined.  It was not just opened or closed.  The deep narrow crowns and undulations in the outer canopy created a complex surface with eight times more leave area than the ground below.  Gaps in that canopy opened to layers of lower canopies, creating stacks of microclimates and microhabitats.  Researchers referred to the layered structure as architecture and found plants and animals using different parts of that architecture for different purposes. (….) A notable characteristic of Douglas fir that caught the attention of researchers throughout the century was that these trees grow to be very big and very old.  What were the secrets to living old and well in the Pacific Northwest forests?

Afterword in Windfall journal’s “Poetry of Witness in the Northwest” issue:

It’s important to draw attention to these areas for a variety of reasons—because we need to express gratitude for the wonderful planet we inhabit, and we need to teach about places that might be damaged if no one is paying attention to them. And, most importantly, an intact natural world is the sine qua non for our very existence. Those of us with the financial resources, good health, free time, and geographic good luck to be able to go into the green world regularly need to continue to write poems of wild nature.

And from Joan Maloof, another previous Writer-in-Residence at the Andrews Forest (included in The Forest Log):

A Short Poem Early on a Fall Morning

The bracken is brown,
the maiden’s hair is turning gray,
you poets, with your list of names,
you will become silent when the snow falls.

Today I had the truly great joy of encountering Spotted Owls in the wild!

The Northern Spotted Owl is currently listed as threatened in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. According to Fred Swanson, the Andrews Forest was formerly home to perhaps 7 or 8 mating pairs of Spotted Owls, but their numbers are dwindling, despite substantial efforts to conserve their old growth nesting habitat. Currently, there may be 3 or 4 mating pairs within Andrews. As if their difficulties with forest demise weren’t bad enough (old growth replaced by younger forests managed for timber), their territory is now being invaded by an increasing population of Barred Owls. The Barred are larger, more reproductively successful, and more omnivorous. The Spotted Owl eats only a few things; the Barred Owl eats many things.

If you’d like to hear the sound of the Spotted Owl, here is a site that includes a sound file of their call (both hooting and whistling). The recording has it backwards, perhaps:  I heard them doing their ‘location whistling’ for quite a while before there was any ‘hooting.’

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Spotted_Owl/id

There is also a discussion of ethics and the “Spotted Owl controversy” on Santa Clara University’s website, for those who are foggy on some of the details, history, and implications:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v4n1/homepage.html

I went out this morning with the “owl crew” — researchers who are gathering data on the Northern Spotted Owl in Andrews and the surrounding Willamette National Forest.  After a rutted drive, we hiked a short distance up-slope into rugged old growth terrain to a known site, where we met both a female and male, hanging out near their nest.  Amazing experience!

Delightful owls!! They seem small in my photos, perhaps, but only because they are in such large trees.

The researchers follow a protocol that includes offering a few live mice to owls (this helps bring them in closer for band checks).  Once they have prey in hand, they often reveal the location of the nesting tree. The female owl knew this drill (actually she even knew the sound of the tupperware mouse container opening,  I think).  She was not shy, and hooked her mice in record time. Her partner, however, was reluctant to approach us. The researchers were excited to meet him (“the boyfriend”) and said that it was probably only his second encounter with people. His first encounter was being man-handled during banding, so the boyfriend remained carefully aloof.

An owl researcher just deposited this fresh mouse on the great fallen tree beside my camera. The log was very large — maybe chest-high — and the mouse just sat there for a moment, getting its bearings. Seconds later the owl arrived. One minute the mouse was sitting on the log, wondering which way to go, and the next minute the spotted owl had grabbed it and was back up on the branch. The owl DROPPED silently on the mouse, just a foot in front of me, in one great outspreading of wings, then the snatch, and then a soft ‘whooh, whooh’ wing-sound as she flew back to her perch.

If you look closely you will see the mouse is now in the female’s beak. The spotted owl is wondering whether to “cache” her fresh-caught mouse, eat it, or bring it high up into an adjacent old-growth Douglas fir, where her nest is located. In the end, I believe the decision was made to tuck this juicy mouse away in a hole in the tree, and save it for later….

Later, the male owl DID bring a mouse up to the nest, which required a number of “ladder” steps, flying counter-clockwise in trees surrounding the nest tree, getting a bit higher with each perch. The nest is located at the very top, in the rotted top-notch of a massive Douglas fir; the crown is thick with new tops that have been sent up, and the nest is probably sheltered at the center, hidden between them.

My heart was singing owl-songs all the way down the mountain.  Best of all:  as I was driving, an owl swooped over the road in dense, mossy trees, just ahead of me!  I stopped the truck, turned off the engine, and tried out my new-found owl vocabulary, hooting hopefully (and badly) into the trees, wondering if it was the watchful boyfriend bird, but nothing answered.

I wondered about this unusually perforated woodpile, located on the long porch of the building where I’m staying at Andrews Experimental Forest — until I met the phenology researcher who set them up. He explained that mason bees take advantage of existing holes drilled in trees to deposit their eggs in chambers, each walled from the next with a curtain of mud, and each provisioned with a supply of pollen. Look closely: you’ll see empty holes, partially-plastered holes, and finished holes that have been sealed shut with a protective daub of masonry. Some of the mudded holes were still visibly fresh, a darker tone of clay than the dried holes.

The mason bees were busy today (they love sunny days, according to the researcher).

On Thursday, I shadowed a group of students and faculty from Albion College (Michigan), as Fred Swanson and Mark Schulze gave them a grand tour of Andrews’ LTER sites, cuttings, watersheds and hiked the Old Growth Trail. Attentive, engaged, great listeners, enthusiastic — a really wonderful group. Albion College has an Institute for the Study of the Environment, through which students enroll in a course called “Ecology and Environmental Issues of _____.”  Each offering features a different location. The course provides a preparatory seminar, and then sends the students out to ecosystems in different regions of the country. This spring’s seminar focuses on the Pacific Northwest; the group rode the “Empire Builder” train to Portland, where they rented vans to drive down to Andrews; now they are heading out to sites along the ocean’s coastline. What a great course of study! Environmental studies, sustainability, and feet-in-the-moss field research. I have a soft spot for Albion, since it was my father-in-law’s alma mater and he always spoke so highly of Albion. Happy travels, friends!

LTER: Log Decomposition Site

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

This “Long Term Ecological Reflections” site contains evidence of a variety of high-tech and low-tech techniques used by researchers to collect data from “downed logs” that are rotting on the forest floor. As is evident when you look closely, most of these logs were cut and placed here. Research is intended to span 200 years, which is the decay life of some of these old-growth sized logs.

I hiked to the far top of an “alternate LTER” site today: a clear-cut slope on Forest Road 1501. Okay, hike is too dignified for what I did. Sweated and scrambled and stumbled would be more accurate. It was a much higher/steeper slope than it seemed at first, partially due to the great HEIGHT of the trees straight-edging the upper boundary of the clear-cut. From a distance, they seemed like regular trees but they were ***REALLY TALL*** so that screwed up my judging of distance. I hiked up the boundary line between the private-property cut, and a “thinning” of a National Forest parcel, and might as well have been hiking uphill in the jungle… thick bushes and thorny brambles… lots of bumble-bees out in the vetches, and I gave wide berth to all buzzing stumps. The slope was littered with slash and branches several feet deep in spots, some of which hid drainages creating hollow bridges of debris over the ditches. All this made walking more like climbing. The underlying ground was loose and crumbly in some areas where great tree roots had been torn loose, above, while in other areas, there was only a thin layer of plant growth and duff over steep rock, which was weeping, a slow spring. Berry canes zigged back and forth, rooting from the tips, creating barbed-wire arches.  The regrowth pines were mostly 10-18 feet, although they’d looked like small shrubs from below. The view from on top was amazing (and sad: views of other clear cuts on other ridges). I sketched and wrote for a while, sitting on a stump. Then I realized I was crawling with tiny dark deer-ticks, and so I crashed my way down-slope in the direction of a shower. Now a new group of students has arrived from Albion College in Michigan, where my late father-in-law Fred was a student. Right away they noticed my truck’s Michigan license plate, and my SAVE THE WILD UP bumper sticker. I believe I’ll be going out in the field with them tomorrow, as Fred Swanson returns to give them a tour! Small world

Scenes from a clear-cut:

This Day, Tomorrow, And The Next – from OnEarth Magazine, Summer 2007.