Wake up seven days a week with the Cascades Reader. Get local news, event information, podcasts, discounts and more. Sign up now!
Our common variety raccoon, usually found near water, always mooching, is truly a wonder. Raccoons can get by on just about anything edible left out on the back porch, and once they’ve found a food source, they’re reluctant to change their habits. Feeding mule deer is a very bad habit, but feeding raccoons is a […]
There I was, just getting into my old 4-Runner after dropping off some French chocolate to my dear old pal, Fetty, at her place near Cascade Estates, when I felt something touch my left finger. In spite of me pushin’ 90, I still have pretty good tactile senses, so I knew it wasn’t my imagination. […]
When people at Sisters Elementary School called me in the fall of 2005 about a bat in one of the classrooms, it reminded me of how easily bats can find summer homes in human buildings, and the excitement they often cause doing so. Thanks to horror films, bats have been given a bum rap. Truth […]
As a (sometimes extreme) conservationist, I find the idea of human-caused, species extinction, incomprehensible and unforgivable. In short, we know better. When a species is extinct, it’s gone. Done. Kaput. Dead forever. Our power to send a species into oblivion was first documented in 1598 when Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the Southeast […]
Around 40 years ago my first son, Dean, was born to parents deeply involved in the nature of the world. His sweet mom was a high school biology teacher who kept a pet opossum, “Dartmouth,” to whom she fed canned dog food from a fork, and a father who slept in eagle nests and played […]
The topic of a lot of my phone calls, emails and text messages this fall has been about hummingbirds and feeders in winter, and to be perfectly frank about it, it’s a worrisome conundrum. Right off the bat, sugar water is not “food” for hummingbirds. It’s like humans and soda pop. The birds get an […]
Not being a coffee drinker anymore, and not being in the bird-researcher loop as many of my friends are, the business of songbird conservation and coffee-growing methods went right over my head. That is, until Doug Baell grabbed my attention. “Are you going to do the story on coffee and songbirds?” he asked me one […]
One of fastest and most aggressive beetles crawling, running and chasing other invertebrates on the surface of our planet can be found on the Oregon Coast: the tiger beetle. While tigers have hunting methods similar to tiger beetles, they’re not normally found on the Oregon coast, or North America for that matter — thankfully, I […]
On Nov. 28, the Belfry in Sisters will be echoing with the sounds of elephants trumpeting and stamping their feet in greeting. Don Miller, a wondrous photographer and lecturer—and also an outstanding humanitarian—will be there to tell us about his travels around the world, his help for people with medical issues and his work with […]
S o, there I was, sitting at my desk with hacklemesh spiders in the forefront of my old, tired, almost-worn- out brain, when a hot-to-trot house spider suddenly ran down my face, onto my shirt, and vanished under my chair. Talk about being at the right place at the right time; it was followed by […]
Get the best of The Source - Bend, Oregon directly in your email inbox.
Sending to:
