Jim Anderson

Those of you who keep chickens and other livestock know what joy there
is in talking to them. (Yes, chickens are "livestock," even though the
sheriff doesn't think so when a stray dog kills one of mine.)

"Good
morning, chickies," is my usual greeting. Then I ask them, "How many
eggs are you going to lay for me today?" slyly pointing to the pile of
empty egg cartons I keep close by to remind them to keep their minds on
their business.
I have a few beautiful Buff Orpingtons, a
couple of Barred Rocks, Rhode Island Reds and handsome Aracanas, the
last of which lays lovely green-shelled eggs. When I greet them in the
morning, they all respond with the usual clucking and chicken grunts
that means "all's well" and "What goodies do you have for us this
morning, James?"

In the 80-plus years I have lived on this grand old planet we call
home, I have come to realize that the world of nature is so complex I
will go out among the stars with only a hint of what's really going on.

Take
bot flies for example. These pestiferous little buggers (pun intended)
make life miserable for any mammal they come into contact with,
especially rodents, livestock and humans. Scientists have placed bot
flies into one big family: Oestroidea (OH-est-ROW-eh-dee-ah). The bot
fly is a "true fly" that is, they belong to the order Diptera, which
means, "with two wings." While all the other billions of insects are
flying around with four wings, flies have only two, and a "balancer"
that gives them the remarkable agility to avoid fly swatters and such.

Snow Geese & MonarchsThis is it, Good People, the time when Mother Nature's Children must
obey the Sun. Whether it be Monarch butterflies, Snow Geese,
hummingbirds, night hawks, plovers, whales or Flammulated Owls, they
can not stop themselves from obeying the Call of the Sun. Even human
Snowbirds traveling south in their gas-guzzling Mini-Winnies must obey
the call of our Sun.

Way back, when most of you were just a gleam in
your daddy's eye – and for some, even before that – I was a
duck-hunter. Yes, I do love to eat mallards and geese. Every
Thanksgiving I would head off for Summer Lake to shoot snow geese, and
Crane Prairie Reservoir for Canada Geese and mallards. (When I
discovered I was killing families of Canada Geese and leaving orphans,
I realized the error of my ways and quit.)
It was the discovery
of Russian bands on snow geese harvested at Summer Lake, however, that
also gave me further insight on the migration of birds. At the same
time, some of the pin-tail ducks I killed were also wearing bands

In these election times, it's all too easy to wave Old Glory; we see a lot of well-meaning folks standing in front of the flag when delivering a political message, or hiding behind it when things go wrong.
Last week, I received an e-mail from my daughter, Kristin, who manages a medical clinic in North Carolina. Most of what that dear girl sends me is fun and games, but every once in a while she smacks me alongside the head with a dose of reality and something to think about. To whit:
Three startling photographs of the largest re-enlistment ceremony ever held on the 4th of July, 2008 at Al Faw Palace, Baghdad, Iraq, with General David Petraeus officiating. This outstanding event was – as far as I can find out – ash-canned by our main-stream media. Even Jim Lehrer (may have) missed it, and that's a surprise. Makes me wonder why… Is there someone "out there" censoring our news…?
I have two USAF sons who are F-16 drivers, and have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of them on the UN "peace-keeping" assignments in Bosnia. At present, my oldest son, a Colonel in the USAF, is serving in Turkey, and his brother is a USAF Reserve Group commander in Florida.

A stranger to Central Oregon, but common to Florida, the American Alligator. You'd think any Oregonian with a grain of sense would wait until
January to fly off to Florida for a week or so but my son, Ross, called
me last March and said, "Pop, for your birthday, I'm going to give you
an all-expense paid week in Florida. Come on down!"
Well, this and
that got in the way for us to make it happen; two things that were
significant. The first being that my wife, Sue, went to work on a
summer-long contract with the National Park Service to do a butterfly
census in Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. The other
being a new job for Ross, who is a Lt. Col. in this man's USAF Reserve.
Sue
finished her contract on Labor Day, and Ross, who started out his
career with the Air Force as an F-16 Instructor Pilot, and whom, like
many service men and women, has done tours in the Middle East, recently
took command of the 482nd Operations Group at Homestead AFB in Florida.

Golden mantle ground squirrel mooching at Crater Lake.A little while back, I went to the defense of our much-maligned
rodent-eating reptilian friend, the Western Rattlesnake. In that piece,
I asked people to be considerate of where they go and how they act
while in rattlesnake country. The same holds true when among rodents.
No
one in their right mind would invite a rattlesnake into their lap to
munch on a rodent, the same holds true for our friendly – sometimes way
too friendly – peanut-eating, Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel,
Spermophilius lateralis.
Rattlesnakes injure and kill people by
biting and injecting venom; ground squirrels kill people by sharing
their fleas that in turn bite people and inject one of the deadliest
diseases to infect humanity: the Black Death. And, so you get the
point, the fleas that carry the disease can be found on several species
of rodents living throughout Central Oregon.

Where’s Big Bird?They were BIG, very big, stood about 12 feet to the top of their wooly head, about as long as a school bus and weighed around six tons. As long as you didn't bother them, they probably wouldn't bother you, if you got one mad, however, you were in a heap of trouble – but I'll bet they tasted good.
I saw a tooth and part of a tusk of one years back when I took a bunch of budding paleontologists on an OMSI fossil-collecting trip up the Columbia River near Arlington. One of the young men, an up-and-coming geologist (now retired), found it in sand and gravel deposited by the Missoula Floods. That tooth was massive, big as a football! Yes, by Jove, you have it: the Wooly Mammoth.
These magnificent early elephants roamed all over this country as the snow and glaciers of the last Ice Age melted, building up sprawling lakes around Millican, Christmas Valley, Fort Rock and Great Basin. Dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers feed on mammoths and ground sloths while cranes and herons that stood twice as big as present day species scavenged leftovers and man was living in his cave training wolf puppies to help him kill mammoths and sloths.

Whoa there, that’s a western rattlesnake.Among the magnificent variety of reptiles you may meet up with as
you're wandering around the Northwest is the much maligned, greatly
feared and infamous Great Basin Rattlesnake, a subspecies of the
Western Rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis (spp).
Contrary to popular
opinion, rattlesnakes are not "poisonous," they are venomous, and as
such, they do pose a threat to humankind. However, the idea of
"impending doom" to humans has been exaggerated to the point of
absurdity. If you are in rattlesnake country, you should use the same
amount of caution when you drive your vehicle through a construction
project or school zone.
If you traveled any distance in a motor
vehicle to visit the land of rattlesnakes, you have experienced a
greater threat to your safety and welfare than meeting up with a snake.
Motor vehicle accidents have killed and maimed – and are still killing
and maiming – thousands of times more people than all the rattlesnake
deaths in the US ever since we began keeping records about such things.

Female ticks pre and post meal. Summer is quickly sliding away, fall is soon to arrive and by October
we'll see the end of the so-called "tick season." Although rare,
tick-borne diseases can leave us with serious medical problems, perhaps
one of the worst is the dreaded specter, Lyme disease (LD).
This
illness is no laughing matter for the victim or the medical personnel
trying to figure out what to do about it. If allowed to remain in our
bodies for long, so many things can go wrong it becomes almost
impossible to know how to combat all the ailments, or what they are and
where they came from.
The "good news" is that the ticks in the
above photo are local wood ticks, and as of today, are not known to
carry Lyme disease bacterium. That distinction falls to the deer tick,
a close cousin.

Our world, as we know it, would cease to exist if it weren't for fungi,
(the plural of "fungus" is "fungi") which is among us everywhere
whether we like it or not, and is – hopefully – here to stay.
When a
deer, cockroach or elephant dies there are a whole string of events
that take place to insure that (a) said animal is not lying around
stinking up the countryside, and worse, (b) spreading germs around that
will create biological havoc.
The process of cleaning up and
recycling dead things in the wild usually begins with the scavengers.
During the summer around these parts, that's the handsome turkey
vulture, the clever coyote and a whole lot of other opportunists. Once
vultures, coyotes, woodpeckers, hawks, eagles, owls, weasels, skunks,
mice, rats, squirrels and other so-called "higher " organisms have
gleaned all they can, insects take over.