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. […]
Natural World
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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 […]
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Natural World: Watching for Strange Birds and Other Things
Winter is survival and distribution time for many species of wildlife, not only a time for most wildlife that wander and migrate the season to survive, but also the time for seeing new country—some of which may turn out to be their new home. The short-eared owl is a good example. The one seen in […]
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Natural World: All White‚ but Not Quite
It’s tough enough to come up with the correct ID for the varied finches that gang up around my feeder every day, so when you have a leucistic one show up, the whole day gets disrupted. My pal Brent McGregor happened to run into one in his backyard the other day. The first thing that […]
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Natural World: Why Coyotes like it in Town
(Hint: There are cats there)
A recent television report about coyotes living in Bend surprised some people. It shouldn’t, since there are coyotes living all over North America today, eating mule deer fawns, chickens and cats—thanks to the actions of the government trappers that started killing coyotes over 100 years ago. They thought they could kill coyotes as easily as […]