Natural World

Where’s Big Bird?They were BIG, very big, stood about 12 feet to the top of their wooly head, about as long as a school bus and weighed around six tons. As long as you didn't bother them, they probably wouldn't bother you, if you got one mad, however, you were in a heap of trouble – but I'll bet they tasted good.
I saw a tooth and part of a tusk of one years back when I took a bunch of budding paleontologists on an OMSI fossil-collecting trip up the Columbia River near Arlington. One of the young men, an up-and-coming geologist (now retired), found it in sand and gravel deposited by the Missoula Floods. That tooth was massive, big as a football! Yes, by Jove, you have it: the Wooly Mammoth.
These magnificent early elephants roamed all over this country as the snow and glaciers of the last Ice Age melted, building up sprawling lakes around Millican, Christmas Valley, Fort Rock and Great Basin. Dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers feed on mammoths and ground sloths while cranes and herons that stood twice as big as present day species scavenged leftovers and man was living in his cave training wolf puppies to help him kill mammoths and sloths.

Whoa there, that’s a western rattlesnake.Among the magnificent variety of reptiles you may meet up with as
you're wandering around the Northwest is the much maligned, greatly
feared and infamous Great Basin Rattlesnake, a subspecies of the
Western Rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis (spp).
Contrary to popular
opinion, rattlesnakes are not "poisonous," they are venomous, and as
such, they do pose a threat to humankind. However, the idea of
"impending doom" to humans has been exaggerated to the point of
absurdity. If you are in rattlesnake country, you should use the same
amount of caution when you drive your vehicle through a construction
project or school zone.
If you traveled any distance in a motor
vehicle to visit the land of rattlesnakes, you have experienced a
greater threat to your safety and welfare than meeting up with a snake.
Motor vehicle accidents have killed and maimed – and are still killing
and maiming – thousands of times more people than all the rattlesnake
deaths in the US ever since we began keeping records about such things.

Female ticks pre and post meal. Summer is quickly sliding away, fall is soon to arrive and by October
we'll see the end of the so-called "tick season." Although rare,
tick-borne diseases can leave us with serious medical problems, perhaps
one of the worst is the dreaded specter, Lyme disease (LD).
This
illness is no laughing matter for the victim or the medical personnel
trying to figure out what to do about it. If allowed to remain in our
bodies for long, so many things can go wrong it becomes almost
impossible to know how to combat all the ailments, or what they are and
where they came from.
The "good news" is that the ticks in the
above photo are local wood ticks, and as of today, are not known to
carry Lyme disease bacterium. That distinction falls to the deer tick,
a close cousin.

Our world, as we know it, would cease to exist if it weren't for fungi,
(the plural of "fungus" is "fungi") which is among us everywhere
whether we like it or not, and is – hopefully – here to stay.
When a
deer, cockroach or elephant dies there are a whole string of events
that take place to insure that (a) said animal is not lying around
stinking up the countryside, and worse, (b) spreading germs around that
will create biological havoc.
The process of cleaning up and
recycling dead things in the wild usually begins with the scavengers.
During the summer around these parts, that's the handsome turkey
vulture, the clever coyote and a whole lot of other opportunists. Once
vultures, coyotes, woodpeckers, hawks, eagles, owls, weasels, skunks,
mice, rats, squirrels and other so-called "higher " organisms have
gleaned all they can, insects take over.

Those of you who have been reading this column for any length of time know that I have more than a casual interest in insects -well – all arthropods for that matter, including scorpions, spiders and other "creepy-crawlers."

The main reason that I enjoy them is that they are so varied; there's lots of them and just about all of them interact somehow with you and me. There are millions of species worldwide, with new ones being discovered almost weekly. I also receive a great many questions about arthropods. In that light, arthropods are hard to ignore.

Among all the outstanding adventures I've enjoyed with nature in my 80-plus years, by far the most delightful have been with children and insects: especially tagging Monarch butterflies. Kids never cease to wonder about nature, and neither do I.

One time, years ago, over at OMSI's old Camp Hancock -which has since been elevated to the status of "Hancock Field Station" – a young man asked, "Mr. Anderson (adults were called, "Mister" back in those days), I wonder if you could tell me about the birds and bees?"

That was a surprise, I knew the young man well. His dad was a doctor, so him asking me about that business was something I hadn't expected. Anyway, I told him if he wanted to join me with any of his friends after the campfire that evening, we'd get down to brass tacks. Just as planned, he and two of his tent pals (we camped in tents in those days, not the snazzy "A" frames they have today) came along, and as we settled down by the dying campfire I started into Planned Parenthood 101.

Marilyn Miller's bushy-tailed packrat on its way to another home. Have you ever seen a guiltier look in your life than the one you find on a pack rat's face? That poor bushy-tailed pack rat was caught red-handed… No, "green-handed" would be a more accurate. Marilyn Miller of SE Bend caught him plundering her kitchen garden, an unfortunate habit that pack rats cannot seem to break.

Pack rats do not need to drink water, but rather get what they need from the spinach, lettuce, peas and corn they eat in your garden. They then recycle the water repeatedly and probably pee reluctantly, and when they do, it's enough to gag a maggot. Most of the white stains you see on our rim rock are pack rat scent posts or defecation sites.

Bushy-tailed pack rats in the wild are a beautiful and wonderful part of the magnificent World of Nature. However, the ones that got into my church friend's pantry and plundered his emergency food supply was a different matter altogether. Moreover, the ones that got into another friend's well house and ate all the insulation off the walls and wires were not thought of too kindly either.

Then, my good friend, Scott, a fellow Volvo enthusiast, had a pack rat that built a huge stick nest under the hood of his '68 Ford pickup. Scott probably wouldn't have minded that too much if the pack rat hadn't eaten all the insulation off the wiring harness and the spark plug wires.

Female mosquito doing her thing… Well, we might as well go right to the Bad News first: Mosquitoes are Bad News for Homo sapiens; they carry and spread all kinds of nasty diseases that make life very difficult for us. The first documented case of a mosquito carrying West Nile Virus for this year was over in Baker City on August 2.

The Good News? Just about every small bird loves to eat them, along with zillions of bats and fish.

The lifecycle of these tiny, pestiferous insects is linked to water – any kind of water – from snow melt to clean flowing creeks or dirty sewage water. Water is so important to mosquitoes they are usually identified by the water they come from.

The life expectancy of a mosquito depends on a lot of things: gender, and environmental temperature, time of year, and humidity. Generally speaking, an adult male mosquito will live for about a week, whereas a female mosquito can live up to a month.

There is one other element in the life cycle of the mosquito that is paramount for survival of the species; the female must have a blood meal in order to generate eggs. The males, bless their little pointy snouts, feed on flowers, as do their partners from time to time.

World TravelerIf you're a bird, there are several ways to catch fish. You can snatch them off the surface as bald eagles do, you can dabble for them, or dive straight into the water.

White pelicans, those gorgeous soaring birds of our inland lakes, are dabblers. They usually travel in pods of 10 to 20, watching their favorite fishing holes for the opportunity to gobble up a meal in a hurry. What's that old rhyme? "The pelican is a remarkable bird, its bill can hold more than its belly can."

If you go to Crane Prairie Reservoir, Summer Lake, and the Klamath lakes before summer is out, you can watch white pelicans in action. They find a school of fish feeding near the surface and slowly surround them, herding them into shallow water where they are more or less trapped.

One of the pelicans gives the signal and suddenly they rear back their huge bills and begin jabbing at the water with gaping mouths. The enormous sack beneath their long bill fills with fish and water, and as they raise their heads, they expel the water and swallow the fish. This cooperative effort works slicker than frog hair, and in a few moments the pelicans bills are no longer holding what their belly can.

Not all flies are "bad," this robber fly is dining on a bot fly. Summer is waning and it's time for the adult robbers to show their rapacious heads. They have been growing up in dung heaps, soil and leaf debris, and compost piles, devouring anything that tasted good.

Fortunately, these robbers are not as big as house cats, if they were, you wouldn't be safe walking or riding your bikes on forest and desert trails. In fact, most people don't even notice them as they go speeding by in pursuit of a tasty meal.

Moreover, they are fast! I sort of look at these robbers as Nature's F-16 Viper jets. What I'm talking about are Robber Flies, the ultimate flying predator of the insect world. Once they start after a meal, it is dead meat!
The photo above shows the "good" part of the world of Nature, "Good" being in human terms. The hapless insect that robber fly is sucking dry is a bot fly, which, as those with livestock know, is a bothersome insect.

Bot flies grow under the skin of mammals, (humans included) feeding on blood and tissue of their host. When the grub emerges to metamorphose into an adult, it leaves a gaping infected hole in the host's skin. Not a pleasant sight…

Reuben and Caleb Anderson meet T. rex at an exhibit at OMSI in the 90s.It is always best – if possible – to turn problems into opportunities, which is what I did recently when my poor old VW "Westy" blew her engine over in Ontario.
With my wife, Sue, the tow truck driver and yours truly stuffed in the cab, all I could do was watch a lot of beautiful Oregon go by, and read a good book.
What I choose to read is the subject for this week's column: "T. Rex and the Crater of Doom," by Walter Alvarez. The book is a revelation, right from the cover painting, which is spectacular, to the last exciting chapter about a comet striking Jupiter.
Most of the objects from outer space – such as comets and meteorites – come streaking into our atmosphere at about three meters per second, but burn up before they strike Earth. However, once every 60 millions years or so, a Big One gets through and slams into our Home Planet like a sledgehammer. The famous Arizona Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff is proof that it happens. Furthermore, it is not a question of "will it happen again," rather it's a question of "when."