T omorrow morning, when you tumble out of bed, grab your bicycle, lunch, binocs and camera and head for the Crooked River Wetlands off O’Neil Road between Terrebonne and the city of Prineville. The Crooked River Wetlands Project is one of the most wonderful things to happen to Central Oregon in a long, long time. […]
Natural World
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Natural World – The Best of Birding
When it comes to Bests, you can’t get much better than the upcoming Great Shorebird Migration at Oregon’s only salt lake
T he Source’s “Best of” issue has always been a challenge for me. When it comes to birds and birding, there are so many birds and so many wonderful places to go birding in and around Central Oregon, I simply can’t decide what to call the “best” trip. There are the warblers along the Deschutes […]
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Natural World: Beware: Looking out for sticky wasp traps
A s if wild birds don’t have enough to cope with in trying to keep from being killed by those giant windmills used to create electricity, with the overdone night lights that confuse them while trying to migrate, the tall glass buildings they run into and the poisons used in agriculture, along comes what was […]
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Butterflies by the ka-jillions!
Sightings—many sightings—of the California tortoiseshell butterfly
“Hey, Jim, this is Linda Sears. I’m on the road over to the Valley and from the Hoodoo summit to Belknap Springs there are thousands of orange and black butterflies everywhere! What are they and what’s going on?” My wife, Sue, listening to the conversation at her computer quickly said, “Oh, boy! It’s another outbreak […]
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Not a hawk, not a hummingbird; it’s a sphinx.
This summer may go down in Central Oregon history as the “Year of the Moth.” First it was the thousands of tiny, nocturnal moths of spring bouncing off our front porch lights, vehicle headlights and light poles—moths that bats love to eat. Then came a few BIG ceanothus silkworm moths, followed by the small outbreak […]
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Highway Legend
The naming of the Oregon Rubber Road Snake
Some years ago—June of 1998 to be exact—while my family and I were traveling through Klamath County on a Great Gray Owl banding expedition with Tom and Casey Rodhouse, we discovered a beautiful specimen of a Rubber Road Snake, flexilius robustus oregonius. As far as I can find, this snake has never been described in […]
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Killing deer with kindness
A while back, I wrote a piece about the dangerous consequences to you and me by feeding deer and therefore inviting cougar into our backyards. I pleaded with people who insist on feeding deer to please stop before they attract cougar, which in turn will assuredly result in mayhem on humans—and the unfortunate cougar. However, […]
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Natural World
Cleaning up Bend, below and above the surface
Natural World Cleaning up Bend, below and above the surface By Jim Anderson Bend’s human population is growing; some say in an out-of-control fashion. But back in September of 1951 when I rolled into Bend on my Harley, there were only 11,409 people living in Bend (thank you, library), while today there are over 80,000! […]
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Velociraptors in my backyard
I have an old National Geographic article from November ’99 with a story in it about an Archaeoraptor, a so-called fossil eventually found to be a fake. According to another article written in USA Today, the so-called “missing link” dinosaur/bird is actually two animals pieced together—either as an honest mistake made by its discoverers in […]
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Oregon Legislative “Busy Work”
In 1927, when L.L. Patterson was our governor, the Western meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta) was chosen as the state bird by Oregon’s school children in a poll sponsored by the Oregon Audubon Society. It’s a familiar songbird of open country across the western two-thirds of the North American continent. It lives in Oregon on both the dry […]