Outdoors
& REC
The Observer & Baker City Herald
B
Saturday, November 26, 2022
Feeding
time
Elkhorn Wildlife Area
includes 10 elk feed
sites in Baker and
Union counties
BY JAYSON JACOBY
Baker City Herald
B
AKER CITY — The feast for elk was laid on in time for
Thanksgiving, but the elk pay no heed to holidays.
They know when December begins, however.
At least the elk that Dan Marvin deals with recognize the ar-
rival of the last month of the year.
Marvin manages the Elkhorn Wildlife Area. It’s a series of
10 winter elk-feeding stations, ranging from Old Auburn Lane
southwest of Baker City to Shaw Mountain in Union County,
operated by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
(ODFW).
ODFW started the wildlife area in 1971. Its purpose isn’t
what it might seem to be, though.
The state agency started setting out alfalfa hay for elk not to
stave off starvation during the long Northeastern Oregon win-
ters.
Elk, as a general rule, can withstand all but the worst win-
ters.
ODFW’s goal was to prevent the animals from gobbling the
hay that ranchers put up to feed their cattle.
The challenge is that unlike some parts of the state, there is
little of what amounts to a buffer zone of winter range, a place
between the mountains and the valleys where elk can congre-
gate and get enough to eat without plundering ranches.
ODFW in effect created that zone with the feeding sites.
The idea, which has been largely effective over the past half
century, is to entice the elk with alfalfa while they’re migrating
from their summer range in the mountains.
ABOVE: Rocky Mountain elk eat alfalfa hay during a past
winter at the Elkhorn Wildlife Area feeding site west of
North Powder.
BELOW: Elk gather during a previous winter at the feeding
site near Old Auburn Road, southwest of Baker City.
S. John Collins/Baker City Herald, File
Once the elk become accustomed to getting an easy meal,
they tend to return to the same spots every year.
Some elk still bypass the feeding sites at times, but they take
a much smaller toll than they otherwise would.
Marvin’s hay ledger proves the point.
Each year he lays in a supply of about 1,100 tons — the ca-
pacity of the barns at the feeding sites.
“We like to start winter with full barns,” said Marvin, who is
starting his fifth winter as the Elkhorn Wildlife Area manager.
ODFW buys that hay from local ranchers.
“We have some established vendors in the valley we work
with,” Marvin said. “We pay market price.”
The feed sites are closed to the public from Dec. 1 through
April 10.
Because there are elk hunting seasons going on through No-
vember (and even later, in some places), elk tend to be moving
around a lot until Dec. 1, Marvin said.
But once that day arrives, and the hunting pressure eases,
the elk are all but certain to start strolling into the feed sites,
where the hay will be ready.
“They know the time frame,” he said.
In years when snow comes early — 2020 was an example,
with a couple feet of snow accumulating in the mountains the
first half of November — elk will wander into some of the feed
sites before Dec. 1.
This year, though, with heavy snow in late October and early
November but almost none since, Marvin said the elk have
stayed away.
The elk that congregate at the Anthony Creek feed site, near
the wildlife area headquarters west of North Powder, tend to be
the most consistent when it comes to the Dec. 1 arrival, Mar-
vin said.
Elk that migrate to the other feeding sites, by contrast, often
don’t show up in large numbers until snow begins to pile up.
During mid-winter, the Wildlife Area crew feeds more than
1,000 elk, including about 500 at the Old Auburn Lane site and
250 or so at Anthony Creek.
A few of the feed sites also attract deer.
See Elk / B2
23 (fish species) and me: a record-setting day in Thailand
LUKE
OVGARD
CAUGHT OVGARD
R
AWAI, Thailand — I’ve
always been one to test
my jeans while working
on one project or another, but
for a few years there, everyone
with disposable income was
testing their genes. You certainly
know people, and there’s even
a chance you were one of those
people who paid AncestryDNA,
FamilyTreeDNA or 23AndMe
to categorize them based on
their genetic code.
My brother Gabe was one
of those people who paid for
23AndMe. This led us not only
to a surprise cousin, but we
also found out that our genetic
makeup was even more mixed
than we’d previously thought.
The Slovenian and Norwegian
bulk of our heritage paired with
a lot more Austrian than we’d
previously accounted for, as well
as miniscule percentages from
all around northern and central
Europe.
Most shocking of all was
that my own experience with
23AndMe involved a coun-
try not European at all. My
23AndMe experience tied me to
Thailand. Not only that, it could
be geographically narrowed
down not just to the country,
but to a small fishing village on
Phuket Island called Rawai.
Fish Luke Ovgard caught in Rawal,Thailand, from left to right: cinnabar goatfish, damselfish, cadinalfish, milkspotted puffer.
Luke Ovgard/Contributed Photo
Rawai
While 23AndMe’s mail order
system typically uses saliva, my
own experience with it involved
blood, sweat and tears. While
my brother was off raising his
family, I was off on another ad-
venture, this time to Asia.
I had comparatively little in-
formation about where to fish
in Thailand, so I’d done my best
to mark locations that looked
viable purely from the “Satellite
View” of Google Maps. Just like
23AndMe, I replaced oral his-
tory and word of mouth with
digital technology to secure the
results I wanted.
Websites like iNaturalist and
Fishbrain use crowdsourced
data from users to paint a com-
posite picture. Think of like a
puzzle. If one person drops a
data point, a single puzzle piece,
the picture isn’t terribly clear.
But as more and more data
points are added to the dataset,
and the puzzle gets ever closer
to completion, the power of the
software grows exponentially,
and the puzzle becomes a pic-
places and simply hoped they’d
work out. Several didn’t, but as it
happened, my very first pin did.
The pin I placed on the pier
in the little town of Rawai was
my first stop.
It was also the most produc-
tive place I’ve ever fished in terms
of fish diversity, boasting species
variation that made me drool.
Luke Ovgard/Contributed Photo
The pier at Rawai, Thailand.
ture. 23AndMe operates the
same way.
Unfortunately, neither of my
go-to sources has reached critical
mass in Thailand yet, so I spent
a lot of time puzzling. I marked
Hours
As with most of southeast
Asia, the day does not begin at
8 a.m. in Rawai. With few ex-
ceptions — like gas stations and
coffee shops — most businesses
open at 10 or 11 a.m. in Thai-
land. You’re more likely to find
a sit-down restaurant or tourist
shop open after midnight than
before noon, so it was fortunate
I’d done my shopping the night
before.
I bought shrimp, ice and a
bucket at Lotus, the Thai an-
swer to Walmart, after my plane
landed. This meant I was ready
to hit the water when I pulled
up to the Rawai Pier around 8
in the morning. The town was
still asleep, so I parked about
50 feet away from the pier on
an empty street and hit the wa-
ter. There was a sign on the pier
that read “NO FISHING,” and
it almost stopped me. It was a
loading pier for local ferries and
tour boats, so I fully expected
to get kicked out once the first
group of sunscreen-soaked
tourists showed up. Still, with
no recreational fishing regula-
tions to speak of in Thailand, I
took my chances.
The sky was a dense cotton
wall, overcast and drizzling, so
I didn’t see another person for
hours. In that time, I caught
fish after fish after fish.
By the time I broke for lunch
around 2 p.m., less than a
dozen people had braved the
rain and ventured onto the pier.
I’d taken shelter between the
two small canopies topping the
area where passengers stage
when loading onto boats, but in
those two small areas, I’d caught
dozens of fish. Still, the cold
and constant action burned all
of my reserve calories, and my
stomach forced me to leave the
fertile seas.
I stowed my gear in the car
and strolled to the live seafood
markets framing the base of the
pier. Tents covered bins of live
lobsters, crabs, tiger prawns,
mantis shrimp, group, horse-
shoe crabs, snapper, clams and
almost everything else that
swims or scurries undersea.
See Pier / B2