Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘animal sanctuary’

This by way of Cliff Barackman,’s North American Bigfoot on Bigfoot author Thom Powell (The Locals.) Thom has written an article on offensive geographical place names in Oregon (a hot topic here) and a possible connection “between the word “squaw” and sasquatches.”  Both Cliff and Thom were speakers at the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium in June.

Cougars are becoming more plentiful, and visible, in Brownsville, Oregon (roughly fifty miles from here, in Eugene) and according to local news reports, six cougars have been trapped, and killed, in the past two months.

From the Register Guard, Eugene’s local newspaper:

A County Trapper trapped and killed 6 cougars in the last two months on her [Cathy Stepp] farm. Now she said she’s scared for her son’s safety and that more cougars may be lurking in the distance.

“I don’t let him out of my sight. We pack guns when we come out in the morning to do the feeding and the checking. We try to get a head count on them at least two or three times to make sure we’ve got the right number,” said Stepp.

Until the predators flee Stepp said she’ll keep her flock and family close.

Around here, as all over, wild animals have been seen more and more frequently in residential areas, and around humans generally. They’ve also become more aggressive, although, this is an interesting phenomenon; if the animals are more numberous, and being pushed out of their habitats for various reasons (lack of food, shelter, human encroachment…) we need to be careful of anthropomorphizing these situations. (Which doesn’t help much when cougars are attacking your horses (as happened to someone I know) and so on. )

And I was just over there in that area earlier today! Missed it; more odd animal tales.
“Randy Pape Beltline” (recently changed the name from I-5 for one of Eugene’s rich citizens. . .) is the freeway! Fortunately, sounds like the elk is all right.

Elk runs through north Eugene neighborhood before crossing Beltline

By Jack Moran

The Register-Guard

Posted to Web: Tuesday, Aug 10, 2010 02:48PM

A bull elk ran through a Santa Clara neighborhood and ran across Randy Pape Beltline this afternoon, prompting a police search for the animal.

The elk reportedly swam to an island on the Willamette River, but later left it. Police at the scene said the animal was last seen in thick vegetation north of the river.

Read more in Wednesday’s Register-Guard.

Dog seeks help for owner in Yamhill, Oregon. A Dachshund went to the neighbor’s house to get help, after his owner collapsed. The dog would not leave until the neighbor followed the dog back to her home, and sought help for the owner.

According to local news reports, the fires in Russia are affecting air quality in Oregon. The Pacific Northwest is experiencing wildfires; one is Rooster Rock near Sisters, Oregon, and one in British Columbia but it is the fires in Russia that has us breathing this muck, not local ones. The air has been pretty bad here in the Eugene area in Lane County (mid-Willamette Valley) and the reason for that lousy air is mainly due to Russia’s fires. The Eugene-Springfield newspaper Register Guard reports:

The south valley skies are, instead, smudged by Russia’s killer wildfires that have burned 756 square miles, taken the lives of 50 people and destroyed one-fifth of Russia’s grain crop.

“You can see (smoke) on the satellite,” Wolfe said. “The prevailing wind is west-to-east. Follow the currents, and it puts it over here.”

“You see a wispy haze, very faint and thin but perceptible. It’s coming over across the Aleutian Peninsula, down across the Gulf of Alaska and right into our area,” he said.

The smoke rising from the Russian fires — the flaming forests and peat bogs — is soaring six miles into the stratosphere, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.

“At such heights, smoke is able to travel long distances to affect air quality far away,” according to the agency.

The southern end of the Willamette Valley is more than 5,400 miles from Moscow, where a cluster of the troublesome fires burn. The drought-fueled fires started in July and multiplied to 589 individual blazes scattered across the Russian countryside.

Smoke particulate — as measured here by Lane Regional Air Protection Agency nephelometers — spiked locally on Monday, which was the same day Russian President Dmitry Medvedev declared a state of emergency in seven regions of Russia.

Locally, the fine particulate peaked again on Thursday — but didn’t go high enough to cause respiratory problems, said Ralph Johnston, meteorologist at LRAPA.

“Our air quality is quite good,” he said. “The levels (of smoke) are low enough that I don’t think even sensitive folks would be looking at a problem.”

As usual, this agency downplays the effects fire, smoke, and other pollutants have on residents. I can’t believe he said “…even sensitive folks would [not] be looking at a problem.” Maybe they didn’t get any calls, after all, what’s the point, I’ve decided long ago, but I know that yesterday was particularly bad. I couldn’t go outside; had trouble breathing all day. Tried to go for my daily walk and just couldn’t do it. Too damn hard to breathe.

Naturally I’m not blaming local air quality tracking agencies for the fires here, in British Columbia or Russia. But I am frustrated with their continued glib attitude towards us “sensitive folk.”

Speaking of Russia, I feel for the people of Russia who are suffering and am praying for them. It is a horror on earth.

Recent news making the loop alerts us to the news that bald eagles and pelicans, are eating murres on the Oregon coast. Specifically, the murres at Yaquina Head. This is news, and very weird news, in context of what it means as signals within global changes, as we’ll see.

But the fact that eagles eat murres isn’t all that new, as the Oregon Field Journal notes in a post from June 3rd:

Bald eagles eat murres and they know where to find these seabirds: in their largest colony on rocks right off the Yaquina Head lighthouse in Newport.

We covered this story last year (and the program ran again last week on Oregon Field Guide)

Gulls swoop in and eat the eggs, the eagles eat the murres. Now scientists have noticed an added element: pelicans are also eating murres. Fish and Wildlife Bulletin reports:

Our field crew also recently observed an immature brown pelican land on Flattop Rock and run through the colony flapping its wings,” Suryan said. “As it zigzagged through the colony, it ate 10 common murre chicks and chased away many of the adults, allowing the gulls to come in and go through their egg-stealing routine.

“Who would have thought that a pelican, of all things, would devour 10 young murres in a matter of seconds?”

I started a new blog: Animal Forteana.

Two animals, the eagle and the bear, are in local news today.

One story concerns an eagle found on Dibblee Point Beach. The eagle had been shot multiple times with a BB gun:

X-rays show nearly three dozen shotgun pellets in the head, neck, body and both wings of a large female bald eagle found injured on the beach last month, and now investigators are offering $1,000 reward for the identity of the person who shot the bird.

It goes without saying I hope they find out who the bastards are that shot the bird. Amazingly, the bird is alive. It was taken to the North Coast Wildlife Center where it’s being treated and is expected to recover, though, according to the article, it may develop vision problems due to some of the shots so close to its eyes.

By the way, here is the contact info if anyone has information on who is responsible for the shooting:

Anyone with information to help in this investigation is asked to contact Trooper Schwartz at (503) 397-0325 ext. 42.

Eagles are protected by the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which:

makes it illegal to pursue, shoot, shoot at, poison, wound, kill, capture, trap, collect or disturb a bald eagle.

In another part of Oregon, this one close to home — very close to home, about four miles from me — a bear is feeding from the garbage cans in the neighborhood. From the photos, the bear looks young. I don’t know if the bear is lost, its mother killed, or what, but the bear doesn’t seem disturbed by humans, either that, or it’s so hungry it doesn’t care:

All of a sudden about 3:30 a.m. I heard a crash because the trash can is right on the other side of the wall,” Perdew said.

Perdew grabbed her spotlight and went outside to see what made the noise.

“Right in front of me was the bear, just chilling there eating some garbage,” Perdew said. “He didn’t run away or anything. He was a cinnamon brown. And I said, ‘Oh my God, there’s a bear.’”

Some of the residents have a good attitude towards the bear in the area:

Dassenko said she isn’t worried about the recent visitor. It’s just part of living in the country.

“This is their home too,” Dassenko said.

The sad part is that the bear might very well become a “problem bear,” meaning, a huge hassle for humans. Let’s hope the bear doesn’t become an issue.

New York City is a long way from Eugene, Oregon, but this story has my interest for these reasons: it’s related to my earlier post about coyotes seen in residential areas in Newport, Oregon, on the coast (literally, coyotes on the beach), and I’m interested in stories of wild animals interfacing with humans, or, vice versa.

Also, it seems that in the past few years, stories of known animals — meaning, mundane, recognizable creatures as compared to unknown, anomalous, cryptid types — behaving more boldly as well as more strangely, have increased. I noticed this pattern about ten, twelve years ago. For some reason I started collecting news clippings and stories of strange animal behaviors. When I told one of my professors about this he agreed it was certainly interesting, but wanted to know so what; what was I going to do with these stories, why was I collecting them? “Because they’re cool and weird” wasn’t enough of a motivation. Well, I still don’t know what I want to do with these stories, except to share them, for now.

So, we have coyotes in New York city. Part of my fascination of stories like this is the juxtaposition of humans, especially in places so seemingly out of touch with “the wild,” even though “the wild,” may be less than fifty miles away. Well dressed people eating perfect food in lovely places, and two blocks away are coyotes. Or deer, or bear or wolverines or cougars or . . .

Even in places not so la de dah as New York City, like Newport, Oregon, the juxtaposition still fascinates. Newport is a funky yet somewhat large beach town, (not a criticism) where, however, “gentrification” is going on in some areas. Expensive condos and too too cute and over priced shops are shoved up against older and poorer homes, often in disrepair. And just a few miles away from the touristy beach spots are the rural areas; some poor, some with one way glass windows wrapping around beautiful homes atop hills, and some in between. Add to this the presence of animals coming down from the hills, or out of the forests, onto the boardwalks and surrounding neighborhoods seems like both poetic justice in some ways, as well as tragic for the animals. Obviously their presence is a sign of what’s happening to their environment and the effect that has on the animals.

Well that was gloomy. I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, it just did. Maybe it’s because right now it’s a dark, rainy, windy cold day here in Oregon. Not at all unusual for western Oregon, true. . .

So, back to the coyotes in New York. This recent news items tells about a captured coyote in the city: Not wily enough: Cops corral roving Tribeca coyote along West Side Highway.

New York’s runaway coyote has been corralled.

The elusive animal was finally nabbed in Tribeca on Thursday after cops found it in a parking lot near the West Side Highway.

“He didn’t seem too Wily by the time we found him,” said Detective James Coll, who collared the coyote with Detective Robert Mirfield.

Limo driver Ralph Rothstein, 63, who witnessed the capture, said the creature “had one ear up and one ear down, like a cartoon character, and didn’t know which way to go.

“I was reading about it earlier in the day then, all of a sudden, I see the coyote and I couldn’t believe it…It looked scared,” he added.

Naturally the poor thing was scared! Fortunately the coyote is in the hands of animal caretakers and will be released into the wild. Other coyotes have been seen — and captured — in New York City over the last five years or so.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/25/2010-03-25_not_wiley_enough_cops_corral_roving_tribeca_coyote_along_west_side_highway.html#ixzz0jIfHWU3N

Visiting mom today in Newport (which is on the central coast) she tells us of a coyote hanging out on the street up from hers. Mom lives literally across the street from the ocean, up a hill, in the Nye Beach area. The coyote has been seen by several people in the area.

The Oregonian’s Lori Tobias, in a September 2009 article, wrote of the coyote population in the area: Newport: Coyotes on the increase along the coast

NEWPORT – No one realized Amber was missing until Sheila Sammons got the call on Sunday morning: a neighbor had found her cat’s collar.

“I knew right away something was very wrong,” said Sammons. “I thought there’d been a cat fight and that I would find her injured in the bushes.”

Instead, Sammons would discover Amber had fallen prey to wild animals she didn’t even know inhabited the area; one whose numbers are unusually high this year — coyotes.

“We’ve had a lot of calls about coyotes this year,” said Doug Cottam , a wildlife biologist in the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Newport office. “It has been a good year for the survival of the young. The conditions were good, mild and a little wetter.”

Complaints about the animals, reputed for their clever but cautious ways, have long been common on parts the central coast.

“In the past, in Lincoln City in particular, there were numerous coyotes that were tame and habituated to people,” said Cottam. “We’ll get calls from tourists and there’ll be coyotes on the beach, and they are fairly unafraid.”

Usually, when I’m at the coast, I’m busy looking for agates and UFOs. Now I have to add coyotes to my list.