The White-faced Ibis is a colonial breeding bird that breeds in semi-permanent wetlands that are regularly impacted by drought and floods. This bird is highly nomadic, allowing it to compensate for poor conditions at traditional colony sites by moving between years to new breeding locations, resulting in local population fluctuations and colony abandonment in response to system dynamics.
Oregon has historically been peripheral to the core of the range of the White-faced Ibis in the intermountain west, recorded sporadically during the 19th century and with the first documentation of a breeding colony in the state in 1908. Breeding colonies were established in Oregon periodically in the following decades, becoming more common towards the end of the 20th century with an estimate of about 4000 pairs in Oregon in the early 90s. Prior to 1984, most of Oregon’s ibises were located in central Malheur Lake, though colonies have since been documented in Lake, Harney, and Klamath Counties.
This nomadic nature highlights the importance of considering the regional context in management decisions and population monitoring, to allow land managers to understand the bigger picture of how wetland management in their area relates to the whole. With increasing impacts from climate change and mega-droughts throughout the intermountain west, wetland conservation in Oregon may become more and more important to the conservation of White-faced Ibises within the Great Basin.