Recently I’ve had some interesting phone calls to my home and travelin’ phones, giving me cause to suspect the alien barred owl population (from the eastern United States and Canada) may be on the rise, and people are confusing them with our native great gray owls. Great grays are owls of the open spaces in […]
Natural World
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Natural World: Eagle Watch
It wasn’t snowing or blowing, and the temperature wasn’t down to the 20’s like it sometimes can be at Eagle Watch. In fact, the sun was shining all day while hundreds of participants strolled about Portland General Electric’s Round Butte Park. This two-day event, usually held the last weekend of February, has been an annual […]
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Natural World: Journey’s Adventure
Sisters Middle School science teacher Susie Werts’ record-setting monarch butterfly, “Journey,” named such by her students, is back in the news. Professor David James of Washington State University at Pullman—who issued the numbered tag placed on the underside of the butterfly’s hind wing—is keeping in touch with researchers in Carpinteria, Calif., who originally reported the […]
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Natural World: Lets go birding!
If you’ve been wanting to get into birding, now’s the time. The East Cascades Audubon Society and a group of dedicated birders have set up the “Oregon Birding Site Guide” website, providing maps and directions to the some 1100 birding sites in Oregon. Start by going to ecaudubon.org, which will open the ECAS home page. […]
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Drop Some Knowledge for Science — Take part in the Greater Backyard Bird Count
Believe it or not, citizen scientists are on a roll. The National Audubon Society, in its quest to learn more about birds around our homes, has asked John Q. Public to help it understand what’s going on among metropolitan bird populations by taking part in the the Greater Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). Each year, on […]
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Cougar killings back in the news
Natural World
There is no question that this is what a lot of people are calling a tough winter. Recently, there was a dead deer lying on the south side of the Bend/Sisters Highway, out behind the old Lazy Z headquarters. You couldn’t miss it because there were usually at least one or two bald eagles partaking […]
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Natural World: The Oregon rock crawler
Back in 1954 I was living in Bend and doing a lot of underground exploring with my dear caving partner, Phil Coyner. I can’t recall how he and I got to going into lava caves, but we were good at it. In fact, he and I were the first known human beings to go all […]
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Natural World: Helping our greater sage grouse survive
Who would ever have thought the once-huge populations of Oregon's greater sage grouse, would suddenly begin to vanish from an ancient domain, and be considered candidates for the endangered species list? What happened to cause this terrible decline? That, dear readers, is what a lot of people would like to know. There were a few […]
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Natural World: Winter and Wildlife
Winter’s hard on wildlife, just as it is on you and me. But like you and me, wildlife that spend winter with us have tools they can use to stay warm and dry. Birds in particular are well suited to survive winter, with downy feathers close to their little bodies. The down is like warm […]
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Birds of a Feather
Where all those birds are coming from right now—and how you can help them thrive this winter
First it was, “Hey, where have all my robins gone…?” Then in November the question was changed to, “Where in (expletive) did all the robins come from!?” Where did “our” robins go, you ask? Most scientific research places them in Central California in winter—around Sacramento—but it wouldn’t surprise anyone if some of them ended up […]
