Natural World

Pinyon jays are raucous, gregarious birds often associated with piñon-juniper woodlands throughout the Great Basin ecosystem and up into Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. The bird’s range pretty much patterns with the distribution of two-needled and one-needled pinyon pines, except for jay populations that live in ponderosa pine forests in the Northwest. Though widely distributed, […]

My head is crooked upward more often in autumn, my eye drawn toward vibrant trees. But when I venture to look down, I see beautiful crunchy fallen leaves and one of the most abundant and obvious plants blooming throughout Oregon’s high desert in fall: the rubber, or gray, rabbitbrush. Gray rabbitbrush, or Ericameria nauseosa, is […]

Successfully growing plants from seed in Central Oregon is challenging. It’s also fun, inexpensive and deeply rewarding, once you learn the basics. Few people understand the struggles and rewards better than Lisa Sanco, the executive director of Worthy Environmental. “There’s nothing wrong with buying plant starts from nurseries,” she says, “but it’s more economical to […]

Volunteers conducted a fish rescue operation over several days in mid-October, after reduced flows stranded fish in a mile-long side channel at Lava Island Falls along the Upper Deschutes River. The event was organized by the Deschutes River Conservancy, with help from volunteers and staff from fisheries and environmental consulting firm Mount Hood Environmental. Several […]

By day, southern Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands stuns visitors with its colorful rock formations, vibrant wildflowers and bountiful wildlife species. But at night, when darkness falls over the rock spires and canyon walls illuminated only by the glow of starlight, the shadows of bats silently flittering through the air is a truly delightful sight. Although fabled […]

Last week, I participated in the Olympics…the Odolympics, that is — better known as the “Odonata Olympics.” Sponsored by the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, Sociedad de Odonatalogiá Latinamericana and Odonata Central, this week-long Olympian citizen science effort focused on recording dragonflies and damselflies, members of the Odonata order, to provide a snapshot of distribution […]

A combination of botulism and bird flu has led to estimates of thousands of birds dying in the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex this summer. Birds are dying at the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in far Northern California. Last week, refuge staff deployed in a boat and collected 500 dead birds from Sump 1A, […]