Ingenuity yields habitat at Washington wildlife refuge
RIDGEFIELD - You'd scarcely notice while gazing at grebes or eyeing egrets, but the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge is not strictly "natural" habitat.
To support a wide array of wildlife, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service makes use of a dizzying array of ditches, sloughs, lakes, levees and pumps to keep water levels just so. Drain gates and fill gates provide the off-on switch for moving water around the refuge, a low-tech version of the binary system of ones and zeroes that operates computers.
"This is kind of like a maze," said Jennifer Brown, the refuge manager.
Brown, an East Coast native who moved to the Ridgefield refuge in 2003, defers to veteran refuge maintenance manager Gary McNichols to describe how it all works. Some 50 separate gates and pumps are spread across the River S unit alone, but don't bother looking for a master map in the visitor kiosks.
"It would be too hard to write it down as a system," McNichols said.
The fact that the refuge must rely on this system testifies to the extent of mankind's imprint elsewhere around the Columbia River lowlands, Brown said.
"We're trying to make up for a lot of lost habitat on a very small acreage," Brown said.
Two centuries ago, Clark County's namesake discovered an extreme abundance of wildlife in the marshy lowlands. Capt. William Clark reported trouble sleeping at night due to dull roar of thousands of waterfowl while the Corps of Discovery camped near present-day Vancouver.
"They were immenseley (sic) numerous and their noise horrid," Clark wrote on Nov. 5, 1805.
Dams, dikes and dredging transformed the Columbia and its lowlands since Lewis and Clark arrived. The present-day site of the refuge became valuable for agriculture, but only after farmers erected a series of levees and ditches to hold back the Columbia River and move water around for cattle and crops.
The refuge, now 5,218 acres, was established in 1965 to provide winter habitat for the dusky Canada goose. It was a response to the loss of the bird's northern nesting areas when a subduction-style earthquake dropped large swaths of Alaska shoreline in 1964.
Continue reading this article from The Columbian:
Science: Ingenuity yields habitat
