Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge

The lower Willamette Valley is the homeland of Chinookan peoples, including the Multnomah band based on nearby Sauvie Island, along with the Clackamas and other bands. The river was a great fishing and trading corridor, and the marshes here were rich with wapato and camas, staple foods gathered for generations. These are living peoples whose descendants remain part of the region today. The land itself sits on gravels laid down by the Ice Age Missoula Floods, after which the river carved the broad bend that became Oaks Bottom.

By the middle of the twentieth century the place was in trouble. In the early 1960s the south end had become a smoldering garbage heap, and freeway construction dumped a deep fill of demolition debris in the north meadow. Proposals floated through the 1970s for museums, a motocross course, and a gondola lift. What turned the tide was a long campaign by conservationists, among them Mike Houck of the local Audubon Society and Al Miller, who had argued as early as the 1960s that the whole area should be a refuge. Backed by the Audubon Society of Portland, the Sellwood-Moreland Improvement League, and volunteer cleanup crews, they made the case, and in 1988 the Portland City Council established Oaks Bottom as the city's first official urban wildlife refuge.

Oaks Bottom covers roughly 160 acres of bottomland forest, meadow, and floodplain wetland centered on a shallow, seasonal lake, though the exact acreage is reported a little differently from source to source. A residential bluff rises to the east, and the whole refuge is laced by trails. The paved Springwater Corridor runs along the river side on a rail berm, while a natural-surface loop, sometimes called the Oaks to Wetlands trail, wraps the lake for about a mile and connects to Sellwood Park and a bluff-top lot.

The refuge is a work in progress. A small dam near the railroad berm lets managers raise and lower the water to imitate the conditions of a wetland fully connected to the river, part of a long effort to reconnect Oaks Bottom to the Willamette. Native oaks, ash, and madrone are being nursed back while invasive reed canary grass, purple loosestrife, and Himalayan blackberry are pushed out.

Oaks Bottom is one of Portland's premier birding spots, with well over a hundred species recorded and some counts running much higher. The star is the great blue heron, Portland's official city bird, which forages in the shallows here and nests at a rookery on Ross Island just up the river. Bald eagles and ospreys hunt over the water, and the wetland fills with waterfowl, songbirds, woodpeckers, and shorebirds through the seasons. Beavers are busy enough that park staff manage the water they back up, and turtles and amphibians live in the quieter corners.

Look up to the bluff and you cannot miss the heron. On the wall of the Portland Memorial Mausoleum, muralist Mark Bennett first painted a roughly fifty-foot great blue heron in 1991, based on a watercolor by illustrator Lynn Kitagawa, a project championed by Mike Houck. In 2009 Bennett, his son Shane, and Dan Cohen expanded it across eight surfaces of the building into a sprawling scene of Oaks Bottom wildlife, often called one of the largest hand-painted murals in the country. It watches over the marsh from the Springwater path and even from the freeway across the river.

The refuge is busiest with birds during spring and fall migration, when the trees and water fill with travelers passing through. In the cooler, wetter months the lake rises and waterfowl gather in numbers, making winter one of the best times for a patient watcher.

The great blue heron is honored every June with Great Blue Heron Week, a Portland tradition that grew out of the city naming the heron its official bird in 1986. Beyond the herons, the mix of woodland, meadow, and water means there is nearly always something moving, from beavers at dusk to eagles overhead, all of it a short walk or ride from the heart of the city.

Spring brings migration and nesting, the woods loud with songbirds and the wetland greening up after the winter rains, and it is a fine time to catch herons and eagles at their most active.

Summer is warm and dry, the meadows in flower and the loop trail firm underfoot, though water levels drop and some birds thin out as the lake shrinks.

Fall reverses the spring rush, with migrants moving through, the bigleaf maples turning gold, and cooler air making the walk pleasant.

Winter, when the rains raise the lake, is often the best waterfowl season, with the refuge quiet and the mural standing stark against the gray. The natural-surface loop can turn muddy then, so the paved Springwater path is the surer footing.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.