Natural World

The title of this week's column comes right from the U.S. Forest Service ad people, a slogan they created to let everyone who uses our forests know that dead trees are vital to forest health.
And with that statement, a word about the above photo. Those little pine chipmunks are having a party. They're imbibing a liquid that resembles “white lightnin'.” And they are only a small number of an incredible array of wildlife foodies I found running up and down that old cat-faced wildlife tree getting smashed. Honest! Read on…

I have a good friend, Alex Weiss, who is a world-class builder, finish carpenter and poet with whom I share good feelings about the nature of our grand old planet Earth. He and I shared an evening together with Friends of the Sunriver Nature Center last week – Alex reading poetry about coyotes, me telling stories about coyotes and everyone really enjoying the foot-stomping, toe-tapping music of Cinder Blue, a splendid musical group out of Redmond.
Alex strayed from coyotes a couple of times and read some of his delightful poems about other facets of nature. When he laid one on me about tortoiseshell butterflies, he hit my soft spot:

Things would be one smelly mess around forest and field without the undertakers. Turkey vultures start the process of cleaning up larger dead animals, then the coyotes get their share, followed by weasels, mice and even our favorite campground pests, golden mantle ground squirrels. Anything smaller or left over is usually taken care of by the little-known burying beetles, aka undertaker beetles, and they are true to their name whether it be a stinky shrew, frog or a dead sparrow. If it smells bad, it's just what they're looking for.

In celebrating Earth Day on April 22, I would like to suggest we take Old Dame Nature by the hand and get to know her, up close and personal. That's what it usually takes to understand why it is so vital that we do all we can to keep everything going as smoothly as possible.
Unfortunately, we've been bending the rules of nature pretty badly over the years, the evidence is in the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil in which we grow our food. There are a lot of us homo sapiens running around on this old Earth these days – 6,839,106,876 and still counting – and there's going to be lot more of us in the near future.
In that light, I am reminded of three unequivocal laws of nature that state: 1. Spoil the water and you will die; 2. Spoil the air and you will die; 3. Spoil the soil and you will die.

What a great way to start the day! It was about 6:30 a.m., I wandered out to the living room, stuffed a couple of pieces of wood on the coals in the wood stove, then rolled back the curtains to see (a) what the morning temperature is – as if it made any difference – and (b) who was on the bird-feeders.
Juncos, houses sparrows, house finches, quail scratching around under the big feeder, a Spotted Towhee trying to stay hidden, and the usual six or seven eye-catching American Goldfinches on the thistle feeder.

If you had any question in your mind that Central Oregon has its faults, all you have to do is look outside your living room, bedroom or bathroom windows. Somewhere within the visible horizon there will be some kind of volcanic feature on the landscape, such as Newberry National Monument – where investors hope geothermal energy abounds.
It's all those volcanic formations that get the blood racing in geothermal energy people who want to: (a) make money, (b) create cheap electricity and (c) cut the use of fossil fuels to keep the lights burning in your home, favorite grocery store and other places around town. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Screech Owl
All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness
it calls out again and again.

– Ted Kooser, Nebraska Poet Laureate

Ted Kooser's got that right – that's what they are, and that's what they do. Screech owls are no bigger than a human heart, and they do call at night, especially in the spring, but I've never heard one “screech.”

Screech Owl
All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness
it calls out again and again.

– Ted Kooser, Nebraska Poet Laureate

Ted Kooser's got that right – that's what they are, and that's what they do: whinny. Screech owls are no bigger than a human heart, and they do call at night, especially in the spring, but I’ve never heard one “screech.”

Back in the '50s, a great horned owl was using an old hawk's nest adjacent to the “City 40,” a plot of land the city of Bend used for sewage affluent, and I took a librarian out to see the nest, hoping to impress her with my acumen and coolness. She, however, impressed me with her keen interest and wanted to climb up and see the baby owls. “You bet!” I said, and up she went. Just about the time that lovely young women peeked over the lip of the nest – right out of nowhere – a magnificent, very large golden eagle swooped over her head.
The adult owl leaped into the air with the eagle in hot pursuit, and crashed into a willow thicket along the irrigation ditch. Needless to say, this was an unexpected event for all participants. When the shaking librarian arrived back on the ground she said, “Don't call me, I'll call you,” and I never saw her again…

A few years back, I had the pleasure of attending the annual meeting of the Oregon Chapter of The Wildlife Society. Among the papers presented was one titled “The Effects of Stream Crossing Culverts on the Movements of Coastal Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus).”
Essentially, the researchers were interested in the role of culverts in the distribution and genetics of the Coastal Giant Salamanders living in the Coast Range. The results indicate that culvert design will greatly influence the genetic diversity, safety and distribution of salamanders. This, in turn, has led to the redesign of forest road culverts by U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) engineers to ensure the welfare of the salamanders.
Never underestimate the political power of the lowly salamander…