Jim Anderson

jim@northwestnaturalist.net
Posted inOutside

Healing and Loving the Land

On efforts to preserve parts of Central Oregon for wildlife… and future generations
Jim Anderson

Several years ago, while conducting some fence lizard business at the Deschutes Land Trust’s Metolius Preserve, I ran into Amanda Egertson, the land trust’s stewardship director. She was conducting a restoration project on the preserve with a vigor I found remarkable—planting grass over and over and over, day after day. The Metolius Preserve was once […]

Posted inOutside

Rock Chuck Day

Oregon doesn’t have groundhogs—but these creatures could spur a new “holiday” around these parts
Jim Anderson

A few years back—on Feb. 22, 2014, to be exact—my wife, Sue, and I were driving a Jefferson County road headed for Eagle Watch. And as it is when we’re driving anywhere this time of year, we were also watching for Golden Eagles to see who’s hanging around, hopefully getting ready to start nesting. As we […]

Posted inOutside

Get Your Head into the Clouds

The first speaker in ONDA’s 2020 High Desert series spends a lot of time looking up
Jim Anderson

Mark your calendars, now! On Feb. 11, from 7 to 8:30 pm, the Oregon Natural Desert Association is starting off its 2020 High Desert Speakers Series with a program on clouds. Yes, clouds: those magnificent bodies of moisture and dust that often float by us at altitude carrying tiny droplets of water or ice and […]

Posted inOutside

How Does Your Water Taste?

Memories of the waste dump that is Alkali Lake
Jim Anderson

Back in the ’70s I was hired to help fulfill one of the great ideas that went with what Sunriver is today. Sunriver is what it is because landscape architect Bob Royston, out of San Francisco, planned it that way and John Gray made it happen. One evening when I got home, the phone rang. […]

Posted inOutside

Those Good Ol’ OMSI Days

Meeting a jokester of a state geologist and more from the ’50s and ’60s
Jim Anderson

In the mid-1950s I was working with Bob Couch cutting lodgepole on the west side of Newberry. One morning I fired up the old corn-binder, checked the tie-downs and was out on the logging road in minutes. When I pulled onto the main paved road, I’d be on my way to Hwy. 97 and then […]

Posted inOutside

My Feathered Foster Son, Part 2

The life and times of one remarkable creature
Jim Anderson

Editor’s note: This story is the second in a two-part series chronicling how Jim Anderson became the human companion for a Great Horned Owl, found as a baby by a logger near Prineville in the ’50s. Wasn’t he handsome? My feathered foster son, Owl, was just two years old when Bill Marsh made him the […]

Posted inOutside

My Feathered Foster Son

From blending up gophers to owning up to the harvest of the neighbor’s cat, our nature columnist recalls the days of having his very own Great Horned Owl
Jim Anderson

“Way back, when the Sun was a tiny thing and the Big Dipper was a little tin drinkin’ cup,” (thanks Reub Long) I was living in the Jones House in Bend with Dean and Lily Hollinshead. One evening the phone rang. “This Jim Anderson, the wildlife guy?” a gruff voice asked. I said it was, […]

Posted inOutside

An Eight-Legged Giant

If you don’t want black widows, let some other spiders live among you
Jim Anderson

One the things I think I’m going to miss when I go out among the stars is the, “Oh, by the way,” meetings of people in the post office, grocery stores, hardware stores, thrift shops and other places in town. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get that wonderful greeting, and […]

Posted inOutside

The Bobcat Business

A tale of wildcat rehab—and catching jackrabbits with a chair tied to a Jeep
Jim Anderson

Editor’s note: Last week, we published an online-only story titled “Bobcat Bludgeoning Raises Concerns,” detailing the efforts by a local vet to change the rules around wildlife euthanasia. Right about that same time, Jim Anderson filed this story, which had a far happier ending. Way back in the mid ’50s I was living in the […]

Posted inOutside

A Stinging Tale

Scorpions do live among us—but they’re not the dangerous kinds
Jim Anderson

Back in the Good Old Days, I’d get a phone call at least once a month all winter from someone all in a dither about stumbling over a scorpion somewhere in the house, woodshed or chicken coop. Oh, how I loved those “Hey, Jim, look what I got!” greetings in the post office, when someone […]

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