Wow! A “unicone” on the cover of last week’s Source, and no one told me!
Natural World
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Knapweed, the Persistent Pest
The photo seen here was taken just last week on private ground adjacent to Hwy. 20 east of Sisters. It’s spotted knapweed gone to seed—one of the three species of knapweed, pushing too many of our native plants aside, using precious water and nutrients doing so, and generally becoming a huge nuisance. They gotta’ go! […]
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Cenozoic Park
Exploring the fauna of the John Day Fossil beds
Passing through the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center in John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, near Picture Gorge, Ore., you’ll find the geologic equivalent of Noah’s Ark. Apparently, proto-cheetah, zebra, rhino and nearly every other conceivable terrestrial vertebrate wandered the Oregon countryside, according to a comprehensive fossil record starting 55 million years ago. Ever dreamt of […]
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The Black Widow’s Sister Arrives
Let’s begin this story with the high points regarding the spider genus, Latrodectus and the family Theridiidae, most of which are commonly known as widow spiders. (If you visit Africa, however, you’ll find they have the common name of button spiders.) The accompanying drawing by my son Caleb is an African brown widow recently reported […]
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Sydney the Cygnet Lives On
Eloise, the surviving trumpeter swan from an original pair brought to Aspen Lakes, has lived quite a life. She survived the death of her early partner and has lived long enough to gain some friends among the residents. It was love at first sight for Robin Gold—one of the residents at Aspen Lakes in Sisters, […]
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Coyotes: Clever Rebounders
Columnist confounds trappers, foils the FBI
Way back in the ’50s and ’60s, I was a thorn in the side of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Predator and Rodent Control program—a misnomer if there ever was one. Their main target was the coyote. The trappers thought they could eliminate the coyote on the “open range”—as they termed the millions of […]
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Natural World
The Beaver That’s Not
So there we were, a full busload of 6th graders touring with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, pounding on fossil-laden rocks in a quarry just outside the sleepy logging town of Vernonia, west of Portland. The year was 1965 and school was out. I was the staff naturalist (and bus driver), and with […]
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Go Get ‘Em, Frank Buck!
The adventures of a sagebrush lizard hunter
I‘ve mentioned this (at least) once before, but I have to give credit where credit is due. My grandson, Daxon, is a piece of work. If he isn’t building huge paper airplanes out of life-sized newspaper sheets, he’s coming into the house shouting, “Hey, Grandpa Jim, look what I caught!” And the best part of […]
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Fort Rock: a Place of Wonder and Music
There’s a story about an old cowpoke from Fort Rock who, having breathed his last, found himself at the gates of Heaven. Peter, the well-known keeper of the gates, saw the old buckaroo approaching, got out of his comfortable chair and asked, “Who are you, old-timer?” “My name’s Sam,” the cowboy answered. “Where ya’ from, […]
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At last! A long-nosed snake!
My longtime pal and devoted champion of Oregon’s amphibians and reptiles recently sent me an email and photo, declaring: “LONG-NOSED SNAKE CONFIRMED IN THE OWYHEE!” If you’d been trying to document that species in Oregon for 50 years like he has, you’d have spread the word in caps and exclamation points, too. It’s a big […]