Outside

“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.