The U.S. Department of the Interior announced the creation of the Willamette Valley Conservation Area last month. The area is part of an effort to protect oak and prairie habitat and the species that live there, like the monarch butterfly and Western Meadowlark.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service published a conservation study in 2017. It found that grasslands, oak woodlands and riparian habitat in the Willamette Valley needed more protection.
We hear more details from Damien Miller, the project leader of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge complex.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced the creation of the Willamette Valley Conservation Area last month. The 600-acre parcel of land south of Brownsville is part of a broader effort to protect oak and prairie habitat, and the endangered species that live there. Damien Miller is the project leader of the larger Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge complex. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Damien Miller: Hello, Dave. Thanks for having me.
Dave Miller: The overall idea here is to protect oak and prairie savanna habitat for both protected and imperiled species. What are some of those species?
Damien Miller: Well, we’ve been working in the Willamette Valley with multiple partners for quite a few years looking at that, and there are some federally listed species like the Willamette daisy and Fender’s blue butterfly. And then there are other species that are associated with oak and prairie habitat that are species in need of conservation, like the acorn woodpecker and our state bird, the western meadowlark.
Dave Miller: What were these oak and prairie habitats like?
Damien Miller: Well, the Willamette Valley is a fairly large, fairly flat chunk of ground from Portland down to Eugene, or even a little farther than that. And historically, that area was covered in beautiful prairie grasses with a diversity of flowers and plants. And then, over the years there’s been a lot of fragmentation of that habitat, conversion into various other uses, and so much of that beautiful prairie, oak and oak savanna habitat is gone. There’s actually only about 2% of it remaining in the Willamette Valley. And that’s part of the reason we’re starting to see some of these species in decline.
Dave Miller: In 2014, the Fish and Wildlife Service did a conservation study for this landscape that was published three years later. What did this find?
Damien Miller: As I mentioned, the Fish and Wildlife Service worked with the multiple partners – the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, the NRCS [National Resource Conservation Service], and multiple conservation-minded organizations, and nonprofit groups, and scientists, and so forth – to look across the entire Willamette Valley and assess the habitat there. And basically try to look at how much habitat still remains that’s in good shape, and how much of that habitat would really be needed to protect and restore in order to stabilize the populations of some of these species in question.
As we looked at that, doing mapping exercises and so forth, we put together in that conservation study, a map of kind of a boundary that we were looking at in the Willamette Valley, and then a prioritization of the areas within the valley that still had pretty good remnants of either oak or oak and prairie – wet prairie, upland prairie and those things. And what we found is that, in order to stabilize these species, we needed to protect about 22,500 acres of those remnant patches of oak and prairie for the benefit of those species and our communities.
Dave Miller: In other words, the first idea was to find the last places that haven’t already been turned into farmland, cities or towns, and preserve those first?
Damien Miller: Exactly. Trying to restore prairie, once it’s been developed, is a big lift. It’s very expensive and it’s really difficult to get the diversity of plants back into the prairie that were there originally. So we consider those remnant parcels to be the highest priority for protection. Many of those parcels still have some of the plants and species that are either listed or in need of conservation.
Dave Miller: I understand that this new conservation area was established as part of an initiative called America the Beautiful. What is that?
Damien Miller: America the Beautiful was an initiative by the Biden-Harris Administration, where they basically reached out to agencies, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, saying, we’d like you to work with grassroot, nonprofit groups, the local communities, folks that support the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service… work with them collaboratively to come up with landscape approaches to move the needle, work towards our mission of conserving land and habitat for these species in our communities.
So when that initiative was announced, here in the Willamette Valley, as I mentioned, we’ve been doing some of that, but we reached out and looked to see what kind of partnerships were going on. And there was actually a really key one that’s called the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative. That was an organization that’s a loosely compiled organization, but they brought in about 40 different organizations and conservation groups, and representatives from Tribes and the state. They brought them all together. They were also looking in the Willamette Valley and their key was trying to identify where these remnant patches of oak and prairie existed. And they came up with a map themselves that’s very similar to what the conservation strategy map was, highlighting these important areas.
Dave Miller: There are already three wildlife refuges as part of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge complex. How is this new space – the conservation area – different?
Damien Miller: Well, Dave, the first three refuges, as part of the complex, were basically created back in about 1964. The Fish and Wildlife Service at that time, their approach was to look in the Willamette Valley and identify key blocks of existing habitat with an emphasis on wetlands, and mostly focused on trying to stabilize the population of Dusky Canada geese. So those three refuges – William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, which is south of Corvallis; Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, between Albany and Salem just off of I-5; and Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, which is about 15 miles west of Salem – are blocks of land that the Fish and Wildlife Service owns and manages, mostly for waterfowl.
With this new approach, working with the Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative and all of our partners, this idea of a conservation area, it’s still considered a national wildlife refuge, but it’s a broad area on the landscape with a broad boundary. And then within that boundary, we acquire parcels of this key habitat, kind of like a patchwork, when and where we find them and we find willing, conservation-minded landowners that want to work with us.
Dave Miller: That seems like a key part here, when you say, “want to work with you.” And that doesn’t necessarily mean selling the land to you, but instead having various conservation easements?
Damien Miller: Yeah, that’s correct. The idea of these conservation areas as a national wildlife refuge… in other parts of the country, they really heavily focus on conservation easements. And so that’s a situation where a landowner owns the land and he or she wants to conserve the natural diversity and the habitat, but they want to continue to own the land and recreate on it and so forth. And the Fish and Wildlife Service can buy a conservation easement, which is basically buying certain rights to that land.
So for example, we could buy the right to develop it, and we retire that right, so the land could never be developed with houses or with gravel mines and things like that, that are detrimental to the habitat. So we would pay the landowner for that particular right in order to protect the habitat, and then the landowner would continue to own and enjoy his property. But in this particular conservation area, we also included the possibility of buying the land outright. If a landowner wants to sell us the land, and have us manage that habitat in perpetuity, we also have that tool in the toolbox. So it really depends on what the landowner …
Dave Miller: Why was this particular area, which I’ve seen described as the Diamond Hill Wetlands, singled out?
Damien Miller: The Diamond Hill Wetland, that was the first parcel that we purchased as part of this conservation area, and it’s a block of 600 acres of beautiful restored prairie and wetland. We do annual counts around Christmas of waterfowl, and this past year when we went out there, there were about 10,000 waterfowl using that property.
Dave Miller: It sounds like you’re saying “waterfall” to me … but “waterfowl” like ducks and geese?
Damien Miller: Yeah, ducks and geese. And also, on that property, just recently, they documented breeding short-eared owls, and they have not been documented breeding in the Willamette Valley in over 80 years. So, the value of that habitat for the wildlife, and the fact that the landowner was passionate about conserving it and approached us years ago, actually … working with other agencies and the Tribes, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the NRCS. All of us worked together to help the landowner restore the property. And now they sold it to the Fish and Wildlife Service to make it part of this refuge in perpetuity.
Dave Miller: Will you be doing mitigation work or some kind of restoration work on this land, or is the idea at this point, more or less just to leave it alone?
Damien Miller: In the Willamette Valley, just about all of the land needs some kind of habitat management or maintenance. Historically, these areas were burned and there’s been a lot of fire suppression in the valley. The Fish and Wildlife Service has a prescribed fire team. And we’ll be going out there and doing prescribed fire on some of these parcels, when it can be done, depending on the habitat and the goals and so forth, but also just controlling invasive weeds that have a tendency to come into those areas. So there’s quite a bit of work to be done just to maintain these areas as high-quality prairie and oak.
Dave Miller: Will the public have access to this conservation area?
Damien Miller: The conservation area is a large area and we’ll be acquiring these individual parcels. Each parcel will depend on the purpose and also what rights we purchase from the landowner. So if a landowner sells us a conservation easement, it will be up to that landowner whether they want to provide access or not. When the Fish and Wildlife Service buys the land with all of the rights entirely, we have the option to allow public access if it can be done in a way that’s compatible with the purposes of the land, and if we have the staffing and the finances to make sure that it’s safe, and it can be signed properly and so forth.
Dave Miller: What about this particular parcel that seems lovely – the 600 acres?
Damien Miller: This first 600 acres, at this point, it’s not open to public access. Whenever the Fish and Wildlife Service acquires a new refuge, it’s actually a unique thing with agencies… we say, “Wildlife comes first.” So whenever we acquire a parcel, it’s automatically closed until we go through a planning process to determine what uses are compatible and how to manage those uses. So at this point, that 600 acres is closed to the public, and as we continue to acquire parcels, we’ll be looking at which ones can be open, and how to make that happen.
Dave Miller: I don’t imagine you want to tell us about the various land deals or conservation easement conversations you’re having right now. But can you give us a sense for the scale of what’s in the works over the next decade?
Damien Miller: Yeah, sure. Without mentioning any names, actually, we purchased that first 600 acres in what I call “fee title,” and then we’ve also already purchased 500 acres of a conservation easement. And we’re working with about 10 other landowners in various degrees of the process of discussing whether they would be interested in a conservation easement or a fee title.
Then we have a whole process that we go through working with them and the appraiser, and putting together a package, and making them an offer and so forth. So right now, we have 10 or 12 in the works, probably 3,000 or 4,000 acres in play. But we’re looking forward to working with all of our conservation partners and these conservation-minded landowners over the next many years to eventually work towards that long-term goal of, we call it a sustainable and resilient network of oak and prairie habitat to stabilize these species in need of conservation. So our long-term goal is to have 22,650 acres protected.
Dave Miller: So long-term goal [of] 22,000 acres. As you noted just now, 3,000 to 4,000 acres in play right now. But there are something like a million acres in the Willamette Valley in agriculture right now, according to OSU.
How do you encourage some version of conservation practices on a much grander scale on land that is still going to be producing hazelnuts, grass seed, hops or whatever, that’s still also going to be agriculture? Because the vast majority of the land is not going to be fully turned over to conservation. I’m wondering what a sort of a middle ground would be?
Damien Miller: Well, Dave, that’s a really good question. I grew up on a farm in Minnesota and I just believe that private landowners are so important in conservation in general, because, like you said, they’re out there managing the land. So if there’s anything we can do to work with private landowners to help give them information about how they can manage their land – still managing it for agriculture, but providing something for wildlife as well.
We have a program called the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program in the Fish and Wildlife Service. And that program allows biologists that go out and meet with private landowners that are interested in conservation. I’ve got some really amazing biologists that work for me. They work with these landowners and give them technical assistance about what things they can do on parts of their land that may not be quite as good for profit to try to save some areas for wildlife, manage for wildlife. And then [they] give them technical assistance about various government programs that can help provide either cost-share or help them with some of their work on their land and so forth, to benefit wildlife. And that program actually has been really successful in the Valley and is the program that’s kind of getting that relationship established with these landowners, that later, they want to protect that investment and they come to us and talk to us about an easement or fee title.
Dave Miller: Damien Miller, thanks very much.
Damien Miller: Thank you.
Dave Miller: Damien Miller is the project leader of the Willamette Valley National Wildlife Refuge complex. They recently added the new Willamette Valley Conservation Area.
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