Deer to have an island of their own
By Eric Apalategui
Aug 25, 2003 - 08:35:07 am PDTThe Columbian white-tailed deer will have a clearer path to get off the Endangered Species List once they have another island to call their own.
The Vancouver-based Columbia Land Trust last week closed a deal to buy three-fourths of Crims Island, a 600-acre river island downstream from Willow Grove on the Oregon side of the Columbia River. Later this year, the trust plans to turn the land over to the Julia Butler Hansen Refuge for the White-tailed Deer to manage as federally protected wildlife habitat.
After the trust put down money to keep the land out of an auction earlier this year, the Bonneville Power Administration paid the $427,000 bill as part of its program to mitigate for fish and wildlife habitat lost to upriver hydroelectric dams.
"This is a significant habitat for (deer)," Cherie Kearney, the trust's conservation director, said Friday while confirming the Crims Island purchase. "We are just thrilled to pieces we were able to preserve this."
The island's backwaters also provide protected areas for young salmon and steelhead, including threatened and endangered species listed alongside the white-tailed deer.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other federal agencies will plant native grasses and trees and remove ditches to restore the island's natural ecology, refuge manager Joel David said.
A larger population of whitetails in southern Oregon recently was delisted after making a comeback from near extinction, and the local deer could join their southern kin in several years, David said.
For that to happen, staff at the 6,000-acre refuge must establish thriving deer populations on three habitats protected from all types of development. Right now, there are 600 to 800 white-tailed deer along the lower river, but their numbers aren't spread among enough secure habitats.
The addition of Crims Island to the refuge complex shores up the third and final deer habitat within a group of river islands upriver from Cathlamet, complementing refuge land on the Washington mainland and Tenasillahe Island near Skamokawa. Since 1999, the refuge has moved dozens of deer from private farmland on Puget Island and the Oregon mainland to islands closer to Longview.
Some of those islands already were protected in public ownership, but the 451 acres that Columbia Land Trust bought on Crims Island had belonged to a tree-growing company, Duncan-Douglass LLC. That company worked with the trust to complete the sale before the land was lost to another private owner, Kearney said. Two private owners and the state of Oregon own the remaining 150 acres on Crims.
The Crims Island purchase is the latest in a series of land-conservation deals for Columbia Land Trust, which has acquired more than 2,000 acres along the lower Columbia River and on the Long Beach Peninsula. The trust maintains some of those lands and turns others over to agencies to manage.
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