Struggling to survive on the Oregon Coast: Steve Duin column

Like most of Cannon Beach, I can’t shake the cougar.

We first crossed paths three weeks ago when the mountain lion’s midnight ramblings shut down Haystack Rock, along with my grandkids’ first adventure at the tidal pools.

And my first impulse – after tweeting a non-descript photo of the police tape that attracted 680,000 views and several hundred jokes about women in their prime – was to celebrate the odd turn that ruined our family reunion with the tufted puffins and ochre sea stars:

Heck, that fragile encounter at land’s end wasn’t permanently destroyed by 90-degree ocean currents, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the hottest month in the history of the planet, or another harbinger of climate disaster.

It was momentarily derailed by a hungry cat.

All else is well at Haystack and the rest of our Northwest sanctuary, right?

Hardly.

“I’ve been here on the Oregon coast for almost 16 years,” says Shawn Stevensen, a wildlife biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife. “There are 1.2 million breeding seabirds in Oregon, and 15 different species. Many of those species are in decline.”

“We’re in a full-blown environmental crisis,” adds Bob Sallinger with Willamette Riverkeeper. “Oregon is more insulated than a lot of places, but we’re spiraling downward much faster than anyone anticipated. And we’re seeing a real lack of environmental leadership. We’re resting on our laurels.”

“There’s a ton of bad news,” says Mike Houck, who long ran the Urban Greenspaces Institute. “There’s no escaping that. I think people are waking up to the fact that we’re screwed if we don’t do something dramatic.”

Sallinger and Houck both remain discouraged that Oregon’s issues with housing and the homeless threaten 40 years of land-use planning. They decry Gov. Tina Kotek’s campaign for House Bill 3414, which would have fast-tracked housing developments and expanded the urban growth boundaries to address the housing crisis.

And Houck is still fuming over the trashing of some of the 18,000 acres of Metro greenspaces, which Gosia Wozniacka of The Oregonian/OregonLive covered extensively last week.

“I’m still disgusted and angry that (former Mayor) Charlie Hales opened up all those natural areas to camping,” Houck says. “And I’m not convinced this current City Council has any passion for nature or natural resources.”

There’s no similar lack of passion on the Oregon Coast, especially when it comes to seabirds. “It’s not a happy story,” says Angela Benton, with Friends of Haystack Rock. “Let’s start with the tufted puffins.”

As Fish and Wildlife notes, the populations of those iconic birds in Oregon and Washington are down more than 95% since the mid-1990s. “Last year, the official count was 74,” Benton says. “The year before it was 98. All along the coastline, the story is the same.”

That story may not end well. “Birds are beautiful. They are intrinsically interesting. They connect us to our backyards and, because they are migratory connect us to the bigger landscape,” Sallinger says. “These are creatures that live on the edge, with very little margin of error, and they are an early warning signal to what we’re doing to the environment and, ultimately, to ourselves.”

There are multiple issues on the Oregon Coast. Rising ocean temperatures have pushed smelt and herring, the birds’ favorite hors d’oeuvres, deeper beneath the waves. Invasive plants have made burrowing for nests more difficult on the islands of the national wildlife refuge.

Then – and this is why life on the edge can be complicated – there are the bald eagles.

Twenty years ago, Dawn Harris with Fish and Wildlife reminds us, bald eagles were on the endangered species list, thanks in large part to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and 80,000 murres were living the life on Colony Rock at Yaquina Head.

“You’d see twenty to thirty thousand chicks every year,” says Harris, who fell in love with birds while hiking the Great Smoky Mountains with her grandfather.

But as eagles made their glorious comeback, they found fine dining at Colony Rock. When the eagles aren’t feasting on murres, their presence so terrifies the seabirds that they abandon their nests, leaving eggs and chicks vulnerable to secondary predators, the gulls and crows.

“What we’re seeing now is that the murres can’t incubate for the 30 days they need to hatch their chicks,” Harris says. “Productivity on the North Coast has plummeted.

“What do we do? Manage bald eagles? That’s not on the table.”

All is not lost, of course. Not yet. “We’re seeing murres adapting a little bit,” Harris says. They’re finding smaller nooks and crannies in which to nest, more sheltered from predators.

The birds are honing their survival skills, as one must in the wild. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers destroyed the world’s largest colony of double-crested cormorants on East Sand Island to protect salmon in the Columbia River, what did the cormorants do?

“They moved farther up the Columbia,” Sallinger says, “where they’re eating more salmon.”

Not far from Haystack Rock, Angela Benton puts it well: “Nature has a way of finding the balance.”

You and I have a way of screwing that up. We traffic in the plastics that end up in the Pacific Garbage Patch or devolve into the microplastics Benton feels underfoot when she walks Cannon Beach.

We launch drones on the coast that seabirds mistake for predators. We ignore global warming until the Antarctica ice-melt is off the charts. (This is the rough equivalent, Bill McKibben says, of “South Pole to Planet Earth: Drop Dead.”)

And whatever my faith in nature, I no longer know what that leaves for your grandchildren or mine, much less that gallivanting cougar.

— Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com