Welcome
The Willapa National Wildlife Refuge Complex includes three national wildlife refuges which truly represent the Pacific Northwest. Willapa National Wildlife Refuge (where the Complex Headquarters is located) is over 15,000 acres of tidelands, temperate rainforest, ocean beaches, and small streams. It also includes several rare remnants of old growth coastal cedar forest. Preserving habitat for spawning wild salmon, hundreds of thousands of migrating shorebirds, and threatened and endangered species such as the marbled murrelet, the refuge is a great place to see what the Pacific Northwest looked like 100 years ago. The Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge includes approximately 20 islands stretching over 27 miles of the Columbia River, from the mouth upstream nearly to Skamakowa, WA. Although rarely visited by humans, people following in Lewis and Clark's footsteps (or paddles!) are discovering this little-known refuge. Julia Butler Hansen Refuge for Columbian White-tailed Deer was established in the 1970s to preserve habitat for the endangered Columbian white-tailed deer (CWT deer). The CWT deer–the only white-tailed deer found west of the Cascade Mountains–had been believed to be extinct since the 1930s. When a small remnant population was discovered in the early 1960s, the refuge was quickly established to preserve the species and nurse them along the road to recovery. |