Jim Anderson

Birds have no inkling as to the hazards of getting too close to high-powered electricity. As a result, if a bird touches two or more wires, the meeting is fatal. Electricity in wires is similar to controlled lightning; the current is always searching for a way back to the earth. A bird standing in that path is a conductor and will be fried. Period—exclamation point!
When wires were first attached to poles to carry electrical energy to far-flung places, not many people gave much thought to what happened to raptors when the wires crossed. Blam! Curtains for said bird. It wasn’t until it began to cost money to put those circuits back together that power companies began to do something about transmission wires that killed birds.

By now everyone is familiar with the push to change the rules on recreational trapping in Oregon – a movement that got started thanks mostly to the trapper who left a deadly trap so close to a hiking trail on the banks of the Metolius River that a hiker’s dog stumbled into it and was almost crushed to death. Since then, newspaper and TV stations have published more than two dozen stories focusing on the current regulatory system.
That 1,200 or so people can kill – for fun and profit and largely without regulation – the wildlife treasures known as “furbearers” has always been a mystery to me.

That’s the way the love of birds – and ultimately all of nature – usually begins; the surprise of discovering that a gray jay will come to you for a hand-out. At that moment, two things happen: there’s a link in the heart between child and bird, and at the same time, the person must ensure that he or she does no harm. That means providing the animal with food that will be in balance with a normal diet, something to which some people do not adhere.
I would like to say this is how my love for all of nature began, but it wasn’t. I shot and killed a beautiful owl that flew over my head just to prove I was a good shot. How things changed when I proudly brought it back to show to my uncles – especially when I met my grandfather instead – who asked why I shot the owl.

Every living thing on this beautiful old Earth will eventually die. Whether it be bunchgrass on the hillside, a towering Ponderosa or a flea – death is part of Life. In spite of that unalterable fact, we humans spend a lot of time trying to side step the issue, but when it happens instantly – as it did to our dear bird-loving pal, Dean Hale, in a head-on collision last month on Hwy. 20 between Bend and Sisters, we realize – wham! It’s all over…at least for this life.
Dean was a birder who spent thousands of hours watching and helping birds. It is an understatement to say he was dedicated to his avian neighbors and loved by everyone with whom we share Life with on this beautiful planet.

With all the hullabaloo over the mysterious death of honeybees and the impact on local beekeeping and honey production, Oregon State University (OSU) and our local Central Oregon Beekeeping Association (COBA) are coming to the rescue. Master beekeepers Stephen Harris, and his sidekick, John Connely, both of Bend, are teaching a yearlong course on apprentice beekeeping in Bend,
Harris grew up in Bend, has been raising honeybees for 30-plus years, and has several active and healthy hives around the west side of Bend. That’s a lot of years of honey production and about 80 millions bees that have passed through his life. Connely started out as a commercial beekeeper when he was in the sixth grade living in Phoenix, Ariz., selling honey from a roadside stand and has been keeping bees ever since.

The High Desert Museum’s painful loss of their premier live exhibit, Ochoco the bobcat, triggered memories that go back to the ’50s when I first became involved with rehabilitating wildlife.
The year was 1955 or 56, when I met a de-clawed bobcat of the same disposition as Ochoco being kept in horrifying conditions at a sporting goods store on the corner of 3rd and Franklin in Bend.
Customers and passersby would come into the shop and poke sticks at the poor animal that was stuffed in a four-by-four cage. It would hiss and strike out at the pestiferous people who, for some strange reason, got some kind of diabolical joy out of making it thrash about.

The longer I live, the more I wish scientists would succeed with induced hibernation, especially for old duffers like me. I hate winter! Well, not really…I do enjoy going out with my family getting in the winter wood, something I’ve been doing almost all my life. When I was a kid, we had a huge wood-burning furnace in the basement of the New England farm house where I grew up.
Woodcutting started in October in Connecticut, with oak and elm being the dominant species we used for keeping warm in winter, and the old two-man cross-cut misery whip was the saw we used to buck up logs into firewood lengths. I can still hear my Uncle Harry on the other end of the cross-cut: “Catsfur (my nickname), I don’t mind you ridin’ that thing, but would you quit draggin’ your feet!”
If I could have just hibernated, woodcutting wouldn’t be necessary, and think of all the money we’d have saved.

Aside from the coyote and wolf, no other mammal – including cows – has figured so dramatically in the commercial history of the state of Oregon as the North American beaver. Wars were fought over the beaver and much of western Oregon was impacted by the trapping of these animals and the sale of their fur. So much so, in fact, that by the mid-1800s they were almost extinct because of the international demand for their pelts. It’s no wonder we are known as the Beaver State.
In the 1800s, anything that helped in making a buck in Oregon was quickly exploited, such as virgin forests, salmon and beaver. But, it's a love-hate-relationship depending on what a beaver was up to, it was (and still is) sometimes maligned for its diet of green plants that live near water, which includes precious and expensive landscaping.

Reports of snowy owl (SNOL) sightings have been coming in by the hundreds from all over the Northwest, Midwest and East Coast. My pal from the old OMSI days, Bart Butterfield, who is now in charge of the GSI Division of Idaho Fish and Game, sent me an email the other day with an attached map of all the SNOL sightings in the U.S. and Canada.
But the first report I received came from Sisters photographer and Kestrel volunteer, Dick Tipton, last week. He found that beautiful female at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge feasting on rodents.
Snowy owls are the largest of our owls, both in weight and size. The great gray owl of our boreal forests is big, but it weighs only a fraction of our local great horned owl, and compared to the SNOL, they’re both lightweights.

Back in 1949, Oxford University Press published a remarkable book that changed the way conservation education is being taught, and in doing so, left behind a solid base for everyone wanting to see the conservation of our natural resources. That book, A Sand County Almanac, was written by Aldo Leopold, a man who many consider to be the father of wildlife management and conservation education.
Leopold’s legacy is found in his statement regarding habitat management, based on ecological interactions and education: “This science of relationships is called ecology, but what we call it matters nothing. The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in the ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental health and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?”