This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com

Malheur means “misfortune”. It comes from French-Canadian trappers who applied the name to the SE Oregon area, when in 1818, a cache of beaver furs was believed to be stolen by local indigenous people. Malheur River, Malheur County and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge all take their names from this origin story.

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a wonder. Its main geologic feature is the basin lake: Malheur Lake. It’s similar in one way to The Great Salt Lake, a closed basin lake, but Malheur is technically an intermittent basin lake. In wetter years the water flows outward and onward from the lake. This prevents salts from building up, keeping it a fresh water habitat. For this reason, and because is surrounded by arid lands, it is a migratory bird haven.

The refuge was created in 1908, partly in response to the wholesale slaughter of egrets and herons for their plume feathers, which were used as ornamentation on women’s hats of the time. Eventually the reserve grew to 293 square miles in size. It’s a beautiful, quiet country. Sagebrush uplands surround the lake and riparian habitats.

It really is something to realize that when you boil it down, the Euro-American expansion in to western North America was hastened by hat fashion. Before gold, there were beavers, herons and egrets. That’s where the easy money was. Showy hats with little practical value. Beaver hides were felted and often dyed black for bowler, fedora and top hats.

Today, in wet years high numbers of nesting colonial birds, including White-faced Ibis, can be found here. I associate Florida and the gulf coast with ibises, not Oregon. Observing these birds here feels novel to me. Ibis can be heard in this recording, on the wing, ranging by.

There’s all kinds of shorebirds too, on the shorelines and mudflats.

The melodious Western Meadowlark, welcomes in the day.

As for Malheur, it’s arguably a word more apropos to the fate of the Native Americans than the trappers and settlers. In the winter of 2016 a different kind of malheur—misfortune— played out, but we’ll save that for Part 2, next week.

The environmental audio was recorded from the sagebrush uplands pointed towards the vast shallow lake wetlands. This soundstage was truly large; on the order of 1000 acres across the auditory horizon.

The instrumentation is familiar for a Listening Spot recording. (This is 7th such effort.) String-like sounds with slow attack and decay rise and fall in movements. Among the more novel sounds are undulations; gently percolating guitar voices and fuzzy textures. It gets very quiet and sparse at the 19 minute mark (Track 9) near the end. A Whimbrel can be heard in the distance, while high thin tones punctuate the ambience in a plaintive sort of way. It seems like the quietest moments are usually my favorites. I hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for reading and listening. I’m grateful for you. Malheur Suite I is available under the artist name Listening Spot on all streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube…) Friday, March 14th.