A TEMPORARY REFUGE
Natural History of a
Wild Summer Steelhead Refuge Pool
in the Western Cascades of Oregon
by
Lee Spencer
© Lee Spencer
and
The North Umpqua Foundation
All rights reserved
NOVEMBER
MIDDLE NOVEMBER
The main creek and the cooler tributary . . . no longer cooler now that this time of the year has arrived, but cooler from the late spring through the early fall, now these creeks are often flowing in the thirties and low forties, well below the comfort zone of the steelhead.
If there is sufficient humidity, with freezing temperatures, sometimes comes a complete coating of trees with frost at dawn. This is an unusually beautiful phenomenon. Leaves commonly move through the pool below the surface now and I wonder if this change is due in part to the various freezing events they have been subjected to. The rupturing of cell walls may cause the leaves to soak up water more readily. Any leaf, even during midsummer, will eventually soak up water and move to beneath the surface, but, in the part of the basin holding the refuge pool, most summer leaves are moving on the surface.
On those days when the skies are blue, full sun is now on the pool for no more than one to two hours each day in a swath that moves upcreek and from the far bank to the near bank. The sun of course, relative to the pool, moves downcreek and from the near bank to the far bank.
During the fifth season, by the middle of November, a huge drift of leaves had formed in the left side of the pool at the boundary between the downcreek flow of the main current and where the water begins to move back upcreek in the counter-clockwise eddy. Alder leaves dominated on the far, or right, side of the drift and broad-leaved maple leaves dominated on the near side of the drift. This division probably had to do with the size and shape of the leaves. The alder leaves, though lighter, have fewer lobes and so were probably dropped more readily by the current. Though heavier, broad-leaved maple leaves have a much greater surface area and were carried further and, entering the eddy, were carried back upcreek and deposited on the near side of the drift.
This is an example of one of the incremental processes of nature building up a noticeable result. The drift of leaves—the result—offers then a window into the nature of the process, if we can figure it out. In this case, the process could be in part the competence of flowing water. Competence is a term used by the people who study streams and their channels—fluvial geomorphologists and hydrologists—to describe the ability of a current of water to move particles of particular size. The relationship between particle size and current velocity appears to be defined by the sixth-power law which states that the largest size particle capable of being moved by a current of water increases with the sixth power of the velocity of that current. This was meaningless to me when I first read it, not being mathematically apt at all. What this sixth power law means is that when, for instance, the velocity of a current increases three times, this current’s ability to transport particles increases by around 2,187 times (3x3x3x3x3x3).
If I am right, this six-power law allows the main creek to distinguish between alder leaves and broad-leaved maple leaves in an organic drift of the left side of this refuge pool.
By this time the main creek is going up and down as it responds to precipitation events which are influenced by the temperature and humidity of the air masses and the physical state of a given precipitation event. If snow is being stored on the surface of the ground below three thousand feet by freezing temperatures, it does not contribute to the flow of the creek. When temperatures in the forties return—and they will—with rain, the main creek can rise four to eight feet in as few hours. This is the creek’s response to rain and the melting of the stored snow.
There is an equilibrium between runoff and creek level after a rain that appears to be directly related to the capacity of the vegetation and the soils of the slopes around the creek to absorb water. After a given rain event that has raised the creek several feet has ended, the creek may fall a foot or two in twenty-four hours. Over the next twenty-four hours, the creek will fall six inches to a foot and, over the next twenty-four hours, four to six inches and so on until the creek stabilizes. To Sis and me, the term stabilizes means the creek will only drop a half inch or less from one day to the next. The point at which the creek stabilizes, or at which equilibrium is reached, will be somewhat higher than the stable creek level prior to the rainfall event. If two or three weeks were to pass between precipitations, the original level will once more be reached.
By the time the middle of November has come, there is rarely two or three weeks between rains, though this happened during the sixth season. When equilibrium is reached, this means that the slopes around the basin are yielding up a steady yet slow flow of stored water, that the saturation point of the ground and vegetation of the basin slopes has been reached. After a precipitation event and prior to equilibrium being reached, the capacity of the vegetation and soils of the basin to store moisture has been exceeded and, not being able to take in any more moisture, the excess is moving rather directly to and through the creek.
When the basin outside of the creek channels has reached saturation, a drizzle of only a few hours extent may send the creek up an inch or so. This state of dynamic equilibrium sets the stage for the final exit from the pool by the summer steelhead. This exodus will generally occur within the next few weeks unless a spell of rainlessness occurs or a polar air mass comes into the area that freezes things solid.
Frozen conditions will remove the humidity from the air and begin to dry things out the same as a time without precipitation will do. If these drying conditions last for several weeks, which on occasion happens, the creek may fall once more to nearly to the previous seasons low-flow level.
Just as the saturation of whole regions of the Pacific Northwest is balanced at equilibrium and about to jump into a runoff mode, so the summer steelhead holding in the refuge pool are balanced at a crux too. They are holding high and milling with regularity and, with any precipitation leading to a rise of five inches or more, groups of fish are leaving the pool, some not to return again until after spawning, when they will be readily moving downcreek through it.
With the more regular rains, more and more of the creek above the pool is available to the steelhead for residence and fewer and fewer of the fish that have left return again. Indeed, some of the steelhead are exiting the pool now even without spates. For instance, an otter’s forays may have lead to an exodus of steelhead during the sixth season. During the time when the creek is actively rising or falling, some steelhead enter at the bottom, transit the left side, and exit at the top, my last sight of them a shiny back or a fin as they negotiate the shallower riffle water above the pool.
Since I am reasonably certain that as many as six to eight local breeding populations use the pool as a summer and autumn refuge, different tributaries or mainstem reaches may become available at different flow levels and the proportions of the populations of fish holding in the pool may radically shift over time and with the level at which the creek is flowing.
This is idle speculation on some level since it is impossible—at present—to identify the individuals of one population from those of another while they are holding in the pool. The significance of this speculation is not that it needs testing, it doesn’t. The significance is that there is a lot more going on than meets the eye, or rather, that the eye is even capable of seeing. No matter how hard and thoroughly any observer—human, osprey, or other creature—looks at the summer steelhead in this pool, there will be a lot that they don’t see. This is as it is. And note, the harder a person looks, the more they will inflict their presence on the fish in the pool until, ultimately, all that will be documented is the response of the steelhead to the person, or persons, observing.
This is another way of saying that at some level, observation yields nonsense, the face of God, or a mirroring of the eye of the observer. And looking in a mirror has never helped anyone understand anything but potentially their own ego. If we are being responsible users of space in the world presently, we do need to accept the mysteries that other organisms are. This is much preferable and safer for the organisms—and maybe for us too—than convincing ourselves that we know them.
During the fourth season, I saw a sexually-mature wild fourteen-inch ocean-run steelhead regularly rising to insects and taking them while holding close to the main debris line where it works through the pool. The fin tips of this tiny steelhead were white and it commonly held toward the front of the pod where it appeared to be assessing the items approaching on the flow.
A twenty-inch cutthroat trout appeared to aggressively interact with this smaller sea-run fish and appeared to dominate it. This interaction seemed to be over the holding position in relation to the insects drifting through the pool on the surface.
The fact that this fourteen-inch steelhead seemed to be regularly feeding was interesting and at one point suggested to me that it might be a rare manifestation of the half-pounder life history type common to the Rogue, Klamath, and Eel Rivers. The presence of white fin tips—a characteristic indicating sexual maturity in at least those steelhead populations that use the pool—seemed to show the fish to be a precociously mature male or female steelhead. As has previously been indicated herein, these half-pounder runs consist of immature fish that will eventually return to the ocean the following spring without spawning.
Dominance actions occur now and then with the steelhead. Generally, they do not amount to much.
During the first season, I watched a large orange autumn caddis unable to rise from the water after ovipositing on the near side of the pool. This creature struggled and chugged across the pool going downstream to a far bank rock where it climbed out, its path taking it straight across the middle of the pod. The caddis seemed to stir the balance of the pod away, but three steelhead approached the caddis on its progress across the pool, each itself turning away. Near the far bank, a three-inch fish rose to the caddis three times.
During the second season, the notes mention that broad-leaf maple and vine maple leaves had dropped in this part of the basin by this time. The alders were minus easily 85% of their leaves and about 90% of the dogwood leaves were either off the tree or shriveled and brown, the small remainder of these dogwood leaves were a pale banana yellow. The red huckleberries had about 30% of their leaves left and these leaves were a bright chartreuse color. Ocean spray leaves were all yellow and varied from bush to bush in what percentage were retained. The leaves of the willows were green-yellow and also variably present.
All the leaves on the oak on the opposite bank and the upcreek side of the grassy clearing appeared to be dried and tan or dropped. Sedges were golden hued. Horsetails were one-to-two feet high with brush-like branchings. I know of only one black cottonwood in the several miles of main creek basin Sis and I walk through and with the willows, it is a late holder of leaves, bright yellow heart-shaped ones.
The hazel and the thimbleberry also continue to hold leaves that are yellow. Bracken fern is now brown, though retaining a few yellow fronds. In counterpoint to this dying back of expendable plant parts, a solitary flower here and there blooms, flowers that have been over and done with for months. During the sixth season, a daisy, white ceanothus, and a strawberry plant, white flowers all, were blooming.
During the sixth season as well, an unusual aspect of the cascara, or chittam, tree became apparent. While the leaves on the larger cascaras turned a quite-bright yellow and fell from the trees, the leaves of those cascaras that were under two feet tall stayed green and were retained all winter long. This is fascinating. It suggests two different life habits for this plant as it grows. I wonder whether the smaller trees, being closer to the ground, may be insulated by this proximity from the more extreme air temperatures of fall and winter?
Broad-leaved maple leaves moving now in the flow are often brown. Vine maple leaves on the ground are turning to tissue paper-like skeletons that, apparently with the help of moisture, adhere to any surface that they are in contact with like the subterranean termite wings do. Broad-leaved maple leaves, on the other hand, are like leather and form thick carpets held off the ground on shrubs and grasses. The above-the-ground carpets make moving through the riparian zone problematic if the ground surface is at all uneven. These suspended carpets make a walking stick or wading staff a handy thing for pressing this carpet down to find out how foolish the next step might be.
On a 25° morning, I watched an alder tree on the far bank as it shed its leaves at a rate of several a minute. By now, the bright yellow Pacific willow leaves are common as they move through the pool in small numbers. Less than 1% of the leaves in the flow are now green. The stage is largely set for winter, in terms of the deciduous vegetation anyway.
Some adaptive fluke causes the madrone trees to send out their bright red berries in late fall and early winter. I make a point of visiting one tree in particular on the river. It grows near a run called Ledges. This madrone produces the biggest, reddest, sweetest of these usually only vaguely sweet and mealy berries that I am aware of.
By this time, hunting seasons of various types and durations have come and gone and are ongoing. Hunters are regular visitors to the pool and I have heard various hunting stories, some more than once. During this part of November our second season here at the pool, cougars came up twice in a four day period and these conversations were in distinct contrast to each other. The first of these cougar stories was the most common one heard at the pool, the “Oh-those-cougars-used-to-be-perfectly-managed-by-hunters-who-ran-them-with-hounds-and-now-they’re-killing-all-the-big-bucks” tale and I hear it several times each year.
As usual, the story started with a statement that the hunting was lousy this season and that this hunter had seen no bucks, but had seen lots of cougar tracks. This story was fleshed out with talk of tremendous numbers of tracks seen in the snow behind a local grade school, of cougars killing all the big bucks, and did I know that out in the open desert they—the catamounts—live off of horses? This last item was in response to me saying I’d heard that only kids and people who were of small stature were truly in danger from them; my own interjection a response to hearing about three or four grown friends of this visitor’s who had been stalked (none had been hurt though).
There are lots of stories at the pool told about people who have been stalked. The one that comes to mind is a certain hunter’s friend who was working his way back to camp along an old logging road in the deep dusk. This person, I was told, was overcome by a spooky sensation and after trying and failing to deal with it, turned on his flashlight and—holy jumping catfish!—there was a cougar on the bank right next to him that was reaching out for him with its paw.
As I remember it, the person’s friend was described as letting out a yell and running away.
Did I know they tasted delicious?
The final line on this visit was, “I’m sure never going to see another cougar again that I don’t kill.”
Om mani padme hum.
What is it about cougars? In a life spent mostly out-of-doors in cougar country and not around internal combustion engines, I have found their tracks and kills—one by Apple Creek that was so fresh that a pocket of blood in the body cavity hadn’t skimmed over yet and had attracted, at that time, only a single yellow jacket . . . and it was a hot sunny day in late summer. But I see them only rarely and then fleetingly.
There is obviously some major unresolved conflict between some people who hunt and this animal or there is some demagoguery: some emotional need that is fulfilled by thinking that it is unfulfilled, but that actually distracts the attention of these people from more important matters. There are many more emotional outbursts about the cougar from visitors to the pool than about any fish issue.
As it happened, another hunter came by the pool a few mornings after the visit described immediately above. Over the previous week-and-a-half this person had seen nineteen bucks, as well as herds of elk every day but one. This person carried a gun, but said he wasn’t sure he would use it. Smile. “I enjoy the hunting too much.”
He was mildly incredulous when I mentioned the anti-cougar comments of the recent visitor: effectively, that cougars are bad and deer and small children are good.
“If there are so many cougars, why haven’t I seen them or their tracks in the snow?
“I’ve heard those cougar-are-hard-on-deer stories and I’ve never seen any evidence of it. Hunting is fabulous here.” This hunter then added that he’d seen three bears in the last week-and-a-half too.
So Sis and I ended up confronted with two stories, the first from a hunter who complained of seeing no deer and lots of cougar sign and the second from a hunter who had seen elk, bear, and lots of deer and no sign of cougars whatever.
Once more, mergansers are rare visitors to the pool as they were in the spring and again usually they are solitary when I do see them. The other fish eater, the osprey, is a memory and winging its way south or it has arrived there already.
Dippers are now swimming much more and this may, perhaps, have to do with the incremental rising of the creek. While watching one of these robust gray birds move from rock to rock on its way up the left bank of the pool once, I saw the bird make a wild leap, diving and submerging into at least four-foot-deep water about five feet from shore. At the end of a six-foot-long plunging tear through the pool, it made two runs tangential to the path of this first run, the course of the bird forming a T next to the substrate.
The dipper then flew to the cobble beach above the viewing area with something shiny in its bill, an item that became a small fish. This inch-long fish was being grasped tightly across the base of the gills with its belly toward the bird. The dipper slapped the fish down on rocks and even the water for about two minutes. Then it climbed onto a boulder and slapped the fish against that stone. Shortly, the dipper switched its grip so that the tail extended from the other side of the bill, the left side now, and the fish’s back was toward the bird. Finally, the fish was swallowed. During none of this activity did I see any movement from the fish.
A day later the notes contain another extended passage about the foraging of, perhaps, the same bird. This time the dipper landed on the cobble beach above the viewing area and, while some of its time was spent on shore working the rock edges, most of its time was spent in relatively deep water, dipper-deep and deeper. At least half of its time was spent submerged and virtually always the bird emerged upstream from where it went below the surface. When on the surface, it raised its head and then brought it down with its eyes below the surface, like a very impatient and very small merganser.
During the eight minutes that I watched the bird, I saw two things taken. One was a small blackness at the tip of its bill. The dipper flew to shore with this item and placed its bill under various feathers as though preening. Then the item was swallowed. The second thing taken appeared to be a periwinkle which was prodded, pried, dipped into the water, and prodded some more. During this activity, the shell rolled down the rock surface once. Finally, the shell was tossed over the bird’s left shoulder downstream.
During the fourth season I watched another dipper take a small fish. This bird flew across from the far side of the creek to land in the water several feet off the viewing area point. Using its wings, the bird first dove to the bottom in the four to five-foot-deep water, apparently to examine leaves in the area of the organic drift. Once this was accomplished, the dipper flew to shore.
After working its way down along the rock shelf below the viewing area, the bird flew up to land in three-foot-deep water off the cobble beach above the viewing area. The dipper swam about thirty feet up into the riffle in this deep water, dipping its head regularly. The bird then got up on a submerged rock, then it sprinted to shore, flying and furrowing water all the way to the cobble beach. It came up with a bright two-inch fish which I thought I saw parr marks on. I wasn’t sure of this observation though. The dipper banged the fish for about two minutes and then swallowed it with difficulty and took a drink.
High, piercingly pure kinglet voices are common around the pool now. This gregarious bird is often accompanied by chickadees and nuthatches, or at least I hear the calls of these latter birds when the kinglets are around. The whinnies and squeeze-toy calls of the pileated woodpeckers and flickers are common too, as are the amazingly varied calls of the ravens.
If it isn’t freezing, the honey-colored camel crickets are a common terrestrial insect that is out at this time. Harvestmen are the most common arachnid and they are probably close to the end of their own lives.
Autumn caddis and half-inch-long crane flies remain the most common of the larger flying insects out. Blizzards of smaller mayflies, crane flies, small stoneflies, and other flies, and other flying critters continue to use the air over the water when the sun is warm and flooding the course of the creek in the middle to late afternoon.
Around this time of year once, on our way into town, Sis and I saw an unusually dressed person walking upriver through the town of Glide. He was bearded and about my age or seemed to be so. The cut-off hood of a gray sweat shirt was tied closely around his head and he wore a plaid shirt, jeans, and running shoes. His hands were empty and he wasn’t wearing a pack.
Around 2:00, on the way back from town, I picked him up near Susan Creek. He was thumbing. It had taken extra seconds to decide to stop and I backed up part of the way to guy. The hitcher had run part of the way to the truck.
“Where you headed?” I asked him when he’d gotten to the driver’s side window. He had a kind of a pushed in face.
“Where you headed?” the hitcher asked.
“Steamboat Inn.”
“Okay.” Kind of a smile.
Once we were moving, I asked the hitcher again where he was going.
No response, but I had the impression that he had a hard time deciding what to say to questions.
“Down this road?” I asked to help out.
A quick short nod that I almost missed.
The situation reminded me of a guy I picked up on a hot hot midsummer day by the side of Summer Lake in eastern Oregon and who also had with him only what he was wearing. When asked where he was headed, that hitcher had told me, “Florida.” That was 1977 and I gave the guy a government-issue canteen full of water to take along with him.
One of the few things this hitcher asked was if there was a store ahead and I decided to take him on to the Dry Creek Store, that being as far up Highway 138 as I was willing to go in the absence of information. On the way, I mentioned that the hitcher might well be heading into a storm in the mountains. We were driving towards a slate sky that was obviously darkening.
The guy gave no noticeable response.
I then asked the hitcher to get down a small blue stuff sack from among the many things hanging from hooks in the cab of the truck.
“That’s a rain jacket. You can have it if you want it.”
The hitcher dropped it to the seat beside him.
The whole time he was in the truck, the hitcher spoke no more than fifty words and was mostly silent, yet regularly, and apparently almost involuntarily, kicked out one or the other of his legs, rubbed his face, reached down to the seat, or straightened up against the back of the seat.
I noticed that Sis clearly liked him.
Again, I tried to find out if the hitcher had a destination.
“You hitchin’?”
“Yeah.”
“Where to?”
“Along this road. Where’s it go?”
“Past Diamond Lake, Crater Lake. Over the crest and a T-intersection with 97. Bend is to the north,” a left hand point, “Klamath Falls is to the south,” right hand point. “Lets you out about halfway between, I think.”
There was no real response or indication that the hitcher followed what was said.
On the edge of the highway below the store, I tried a last time, keeping it simple.
“Is there anything I have that would be of use to you?” Looking directly at him and wondering if I meant what I was asking him.
“Some change.” Almost, and oddly, a question.
“You want bread and a soda and change or just food or just change?” I realized that I had thoroughly complicated what I’d said by trying to be simple.
The hitcher thought. “The change.”
I got a crumpled five from my pocket and handed it to the guy. He took it. No thanks. None necessary.
I waved to Del Fugate as I turned the truck and headed down the river.
The hitcher was going up into the mountains into what looked like it could well be a building storm. He accepted the ride and asked for money and took it.
The rain jacket was on the seat. The hitcher had obviously been uninterested in it.
When he slammed the troublesome passenger-side door, it had closed perfectly.
om mani padme hum
Take care, go well,
Lee and Maggie