Natural World

OK, all you crazies with guns. Enough is enough! I cannot even imagine what goes through your heads when you raise your rifle, handgun, or shotgun and blaze away at the assorted signs in the forest and desert. Sure, Bi-Mart and sporting goods stores love you for purchasing boxes and boxes of ammunition so you can kill signs, but is this what you think is fun?
My gut feeling is that you nutsos that shoot signs probably couldn’t hit an elephant in the tail end if it were walking in front of you.
Grow up will you! The cost for replacing those signs that you just have to shoot up is no small number. Land-managers place them in the locations you find them for a good reason, and not for you screwballs to use as targets. Even safety signs, such as stop signs and curve warnings, are shot to smithereens.

In nature, faking it is a complicated game of survival. Birds that nest on the ground often look like dust and duff. The nighthawks’ eggs and babies resemble small stones while a newly hatched Townsend’s solitaire resembles tiny pieces of charcoal. So effective are bitterns that they seem to vanish amidst stalks of marsh vegetation. Mule deer fawns disappear in dappled sunlight. The gopher snake may carry this form of imitation a little too far.
First,  some personal history. Years ago I heard a rumor that a professor (of literature) was teaching a fly-fishing course at a Portland college. The prof reportedly told his students to kill all the gopher snakes they encountered because gopher snakes had crossbred with rattlesnakes and could kill.

Bird strikes that damage, or cause serious problems to aircraft, are nothing new, or particularly rare. A flock of Canada geese struck the engines of a commercial airliner, turning it into a glider. Fortunately, the man upfront was a trained glider pilot and instructor who knew what to do to make a safe landing in the Hudson River without causing injury to his passengers. That incident brought bird strikes into sharp focus at all major airports around the world, including our own Portland International Airport (PDX).
Last Spring, while banding golden eagle nestlings with a team from Oregon Eagle Foundation (OEF), I had the great pleasure of meeting wildlife biologist, Carole Hallett, one of the people who is personally involved in helping to prevent bird strikes at PDX.

The case of what doctors are calling bubonic plague that hit the headlines recently in Bend opens some nasty doors.
From the time it was first identified as the scourge it is, in 1347, it has killed millions of people throughout the world.
In the beginning everyone said it was spread by people coughing on each other, so everyone scattered to get away from the agony of death.  That didn’t work because no one had figured out that the horrifying disease wasn’t spread by people coughing on or touching one another, but by a tiny flea that lives on rats. And rats are still trying to live with us.

Look at him. He doesn’t look like much, does he? Just a tiny short-tailed mammal about the size of your thumb, of no significance; a mere tidbit to a coyote, and only a tasty snack for a badger.
Great Horned Owls gobble ’em up by the bushel-basket, and a Red-tailed Hawk will wait until almost dark to catch a few for dessert—nothing better than a few voles in your tummy to help with a good night’s sleep.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes the sora rail as, “a small, secretive bird of freshwater marshes.”
“The sora is the most common and widely distributed rail in North America. Its distinctive descending whiney call can be easily heard from the depths of the cattails, but actually seeing the little marsh-walker is much more difficult.”
That, dear readers, is a gross understatement. I have been searching for this “most common and widely distributed” bird for over 60 years, and I have yet to see one out in the open to photograph. In all those years I have visited sora habitat around the US of A—from New Mexico to Arizona to California to Oregon to Washington, over to Nevada and Utah, I’ve always come up with sounds, but no adequate sights. Summer Lake Wildlife Management Area and Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are two of my most visited sites.

If science can be blended with the arts, Wolftree and The Upper Deschutes Watershed Council have found the path. The proof of that was well demonstrated recenlty at Mount Bachelor Village Conference Center in Bend during the annual Students Speak: A Watershed Summit.
Schools from throughout Central Oregon took part in the event, including: Sisters Middle School, Sisters High School, Crook County Middle School, Powell Butte Charter School, REALMS Middle School and W.E. Miller Elementary School of Bend.

Birds have no inkling as to the hazards of getting too close to high-powered electricity. As a result, if a bird touches two or more wires, the meeting is fatal. Electricity in wires is similar to controlled lightning; the current is always searching for a way back to the earth. A bird standing in that path is a conductor and will be fried. Period—exclamation point!
When wires were first attached to poles to carry electrical energy to far-flung places, not many people gave much thought to what happened to raptors when the wires crossed. Blam! Curtains for said bird. It wasn’t until it began to cost money to put those circuits back together that power companies began to do something about transmission wires that killed birds.

By now everyone is familiar with the push to change the rules on recreational trapping in Oregon – a movement that got started thanks mostly to the trapper who left a deadly trap so close to a hiking trail on the banks of the Metolius River that a hiker’s dog stumbled into it and was almost crushed to death. Since then, newspaper and TV stations have published more than two dozen stories focusing on the current regulatory system.
That 1,200 or so people can kill – for fun and profit and largely without regulation – the wildlife treasures known as “furbearers” has always been a mystery to me.

That’s the way the love of birds – and ultimately all of nature – usually begins; the surprise of discovering that a gray jay will come to you for a hand-out. At that moment, two things happen: there’s a link in the heart between child and bird, and at the same time, the person must ensure that he or she does no harm. That means providing the animal with food that will be in balance with a normal diet, something to which some people do not adhere.
I would like to say this is how my love for all of nature began, but it wasn’t. I shot and killed a beautiful owl that flew over my head just to prove I was a good shot. How things changed when I proudly brought it back to show to my uncles – especially when I met my grandfather instead – who asked why I shot the owl.