Scablands wildlife

The black-necked stilt and avocet are just the beginning of what is waiting for you at the Columbia National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) near Othello, Washington.

Waterfowl and upland birds find the refuge’s “scablands” an ideal place to call home — winter and summer. “Scablands” describes a whole lot of real estate torn to pieces by ancient floods that carved the Columbia River Gorge in weeks.

Over the years, there have been many theories as to how and why the Colombia Gorge was formed — everything from Paul Bunyon’s blue ox Babe dragging a plow through the country between Washington and Oregon — to the Flood at the time of Noah. In between those two extremes there is the phenomena known as the Missoula Floods. I, however, chose to know them as the Bretz Floods, named after the geologist that figured it all out.

J. Harlan Bretz Ph.D. was an American geologist, best known for his research that led to the acceptance of the Missoula Floods. Bretz published his paper in 1923, arguing that massive flooding in the distant past caused the channeled scablands in Eastern Washington.

That view was seen as arguing for a “catastrophic” explanation of the geology — which was directly opposed to the prevailing view of Uniformitarianism, which posited that the earth’s processes work slowly and don’t change.

Bretz’s views were initially discredited. However, as the nature of the Ice Age was better understood, Bretz’s original research was accepted, and he was awarded the Penrose Medal by the Geological Society of America in 1979.

Bretz theorized that ice dams clogged the ancient Columbia, creating a massive lake in part of what is today Washington, Idaho and Montana. The dams breached time after time, which sent floods roaring down the Columbia and drowning the Willamette Valley time after time.

Hundreds of lakes remain throughout the scablands, along with massive amounts of silt that created unequaled grasslands and wildlife habitat with resting and nesting ponds for waterfowl. And that is what you will find at the Columbia NWR today.

In winter, is isn’t uncommon to find more than 100,000 ducks (mostly mallards) and Canada geese among the 23,000 acres that make up the NWR lands. You will also find several bald eagles counting the waterfowl. In spring and summer, mallards, redhead ducks, and cinnamon teal nest on the refuge along with various song, water, marsh, and shorebirds, as well as many hawks and owls.

Othello hosts a Sandhill Crane Festival in March. Among those who took part were members of the Central Oregon Audubon Chapter, who had a blast.

According to a report by Paul Sullivan, participants enjoyed a great many grand sightings, including: Beautiful sunsets with 1,000 and more sandhill cranes flying over on their way to roost, a couple of long-billed curlew, two pairs of burrowing owls and much, much more.