Natural World

It’s true – just as the title of this story says – when it comes to owls of the New World, they really don’t come any bigger than the great gray owl, Strix nebulosa, or, for the sake of brevity, GGO. The adult has a wingspan that averages about four-and-a-hall feet; the female being larger then the male (a physical trait among all the owls and diurnal raptors). They stand about 30-inches tall and weigh in at around four pounds – and are armed with very large, strong, needle-like talons on very large powerful feet!
The species name, nebulosa, is the Latin for “misty” or “foggy,” the coloration of the owl’s feathers that help to conceal them when roosting during the day. Those same feathers are so soft in texture they make the owl’s flight almost silent.

Now that I’ve reached that “ripe old age” of over 80, I find myself enjoying fossils more than I did years ago. Do you suppose someone’s trying to tell me something? Be that as it may, for more years than I care to remember, I’ve heard the old axiom, “Some day, someone will find a trilobite in Oregon.” Well, maybe.
One place to look is in the fossil-bearing Permian limestone of Coyote Butte near the Nevada border in southeast Oregon. “Hold on,” you say, “We have a Coyote Butte along China Hat Road, southeast of Bend.” Sorry, that’s a cinder cone, no trilobites there, it’s volcanic in origin and several millions of years to young.

This being the winter season and all, with raindeer (intentionally misspelled) flying about, along with ice worms and snow fleas, well, I think you'll enjoy this…
One of things I enjoy in life is watching a person with talent do his or her thing. For example, sitting in Soji in Sisters, fixated on the delicious teriyaki chicken and enjoying the music of Nugget editor, Jim Cornelius – sometimes with Gary Miller and Lynn Woodward singing and playing – I'm always envious that I can't sing and play like that, but thankful they can.
It's the same when I'm reading a really good wordsmith, someone like Robert B. Parker, for example. What yarns he could spin, but now that he's gone out among the stars and we'll hear no more from him.

“Jim!” a fellow naturalist shouted over the phone last week, “Have you seen the story on the front page of The Bulletin about the coyote derby some guy from Silver Lake organized?”
“More eagles are going to die from lead poisoning from this stupid coyote derby than if they had made it into an eagle derby,” he said referring a story about the controversy surrounding an upcoming “coyote derby” – an event that challenges hunters to shoot as many coyotes, which have no protection under state or federal laws – during an established time frame. This week's hunt covers parts of Klamath, Lake, Harney and Malheur counties.

This has been the year for grebes to fall out of the sky, literally. Three weeks ago, a Western grebe was discovered standing in the middle of Bradley Road east of Sisters in the early morning hours by Spirit of Sisters storeowner Sue Purcell.
Sue had no idea what the bird was, where it had come from or why it was sitting in the middle of the road. But she did the right thing and checked to be sure she wasn't going to be run over by a 10-wheeler, carefully wrapped the bird in a blanket, placed it in a cardboard box and called me.
The western grebe, aechmophorus occidentalis, is a water bird that eats fish of all kinds, and is so adapted to paddling on and under water that their legs have moved so far aft they and their kin have evolved into swimmers, not walkers.
Western grebes are black-and-white, especially in breeding plumage, with a long, slender, swan-like neck and brilliant red eyes. In the early 1900s when bird's feathers were big in women's fashion, grebes were slaughtered by the “plume-hunters” who took only a patch of skin and breast feathers and sold it as “Oregon Sable.”

Saturday, December 19, was the official day for the annual National Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC), an event that's been going on for more than 100 years. Participants throughout the U.S., Canada and 19 other countries in the Western Hemisphere count birds in a 15-mile circle. Armed with binoculars, bird guides and checklists, the volunteers join scientists in this long-term conservation project, identifying and recording different species.
The Bend count circle is centered at Pioneer Park and covers an area south from the Arnold District near Knott Landfill, north to Hatfield Lakes, the sewage effluent ponds beyond the airport. Most CBC participants have been counting a specific area for several years, as is the case of a mom and her son from Bend. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.) She and her son have been doing the Hatfield Lakes area since the kid was in diapers, and most always come in with the highest counts for waterfowl. But things were different this year – illegal duck-hunters got there first.

In our part of the country, where trees are thought of as a cash crop, porcupines are not thought of as heroes, or worthy of being placed on a pedestal. I can recall back in the '50s when there were signs nailed to trees and poles all over the forest around Bend stating: “PLEASE KILL PORCUPINES” and porcupine poison stations were common in the forest. Government agencies and private timber companies still pay people to trap, shoot and otherwise make life miserable for Poor Old Porcy (I've replaced the usual “k” with the “c” so we don't start blaming the porcupine for the swine flu, and besides pigs don't have quills.)
In spite of the way most humans look at and treat porcupines, a baby porcy born at the High Desert Museum last summer made her first public appearance last week at an elementary school in Virginia, and was even featured in The Washington Post.

If there is one poor little guy that's on the short end of just about everyone's shopping list who eats meat, it's the cottontail rabbit, or as children's book author and illustrator Beatrix Potter called it, “Peter Rabbit.”
Perhaps the animal that depends on poor little Peter for food in our parts is the great horned owl. Both rabbit and owl are out feeding at night, but the owl has the upper hand. Yes, poor little Peter is dull brown and gray because of its fur, and it moves very slowly as it snips off tender buds, leaves and grass, but that big owl has some of the best equipment Nature ever invented for seeing and hearing small, slow-moving, rabbits. Once spotted, few escape the needle-sharp talons of this tiger of the air.

I've been spending a lot more time this fall on the Metolius River than in the past, doing stories on the variety of wonderful river reclamation projects. And in that time I've had the pleasure of seeing several dippers. “What's a dipper?” you may ask. Why, it's an ouzel.
The American dipper, Cinclus mexicanus, was John Muir's favorite bird – and no wonder – few birds are as fun to watch as these little guys, and you will not find them on polluted waters. Dippers are also called “water ouzels,” and their Eskimo name, “anaruk kiviruk,” translates to “old woman sunk.”

This is the time of year when birds of a feather flock together. As proof of that statement, not too long ago I spotted a large flock of birds flying out of the Whychus Creek area east of Sisters early in the morning and returning just before sundown.
My first thought was Red-winged Blackbirds, as the Deschutes Basin Land Trust's Camp Polk Preserve wetland in that area produces a goodly population of redwings each year. However, to be sure, I took a good look.
Sure enough, right at 5:57 a.m., here they came. Not redwings, but hundreds of starlings and Brewer's blackbirds flew over my head on their way south. I followed them to the junction of the Sisters/Redmond highway at Camp Polk Road and watched as they disbursed in several directions.