JEFFERSON, Ore. (CN) - Sun streamed through bare willow branches lining the North Santiam River as a great blue heron plucked a pike minnow from the shallow edge. Clumps of gelatinous salamander egg masses shone like jewels in the mud. Two wintering bald eagles soared overhead. And the tiny Oregon chub thrived in the warm, shallow water.
"At first we thought we'd make the right habitat, then recolonize the habitat. But before we could recolonize, they showed up. Kind of like, if you make it, they will come," said Brian Bangs, a biologist with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Oregon Chub is the first fish ever to be removed from the Endangered Species List due to resurgence in numbers. The only other fish removed from the list were taken off because they became extinct.
It took a 23-year campaign to revive flagging populations of the Oregon chub, a small minnow that lives only in the network of rivers, streams and wetlands of the Willamette River Valley, Oregon's largest watershed, which covers 11,500 square miles.
The Willamette River runs from crystalline Waldo Lake high in the Cascade Mountains almost 187 miles north, to the Columbia River.
The little fish was added to the Endangered Species List in 1993, with fewer than 1,000 left. When the environment recovered, so did the chub, roaring back to an estimated 140,000 in 80 fish populations around the Valley.
The chub's recovery depended on a special combination of factors, including a buy-in from farmers and residents of the Willamette Valley, who, with some diplomacy from the state biologists, became strong supporters of the program.
It is seen as an object lesson on how the Endangered Species Act can help stem the tide of extinctions in the nation.
Roughly 60 percent of the chub's habitat is on private land, Bangs estimates.
To combat fears about environmental rules, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service drafted a safe-harbor agreement that held landowners harmless for loss of the chub on their property, so long as they followed a handful of basic guidelines, such as not adding non-native fish to ponds and streams on their property, not dumping chemicals or draining ponds.
It was important to John Auer, a 58-year-old financial adviser who runs the 900-acre farm outside Monmouth, Ore., that his parents bought in 1947. The old white farmhouse where Auer was born still stands at the end of a long driveway.
Jont Creek winds through the edge of Auer's property, turning 30 acres of the farm into a wetland ecosystem. Auer grew up hunting ducks and fishing cutthroat trout on the property. He remembers helping his father dynamite beaver dams in the swamp to clear the way for crops.
"We'd blow the dams every spring," Auer said. "Drain the swamp and plant, then let the beavers dam again every fall."
These days, Auer leases about 350 acres of his property to other farmers for perennial rye grass, oats, squash and green beans. He said he was open to a restoration project because he hasn't farmed the wetland area for decades.