Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘animals’

From the BFRO, (and Sharon Lee, via FB) a clip of a fishing/rapids trip on the beautiful McKenzie River from 2008. The person filming this, and the people fishing, were not invovled in any BF expedition at all; the BF — if it IS a BF — appears very briefly on the back for just a moment, and it’s clear its presence went unnoticed by everyone.

I’m not a photo image experty by an means, but it looks like a BF on the bank, until you crop and move in and then it looks like a backpacker. Maybe, heh…

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.

Footage taken by a man who works on a ranch in the Thurston area, a neighborhood in Springfield, Oregon not far from here, of a bobcat.

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. )

People on the coast and elsewhere have reported that their shrimp and fish glow. According to Oregon State University, this is normal and the fish is safe to consume.

Shrimp and other seafood can appear luminescent, courtesy of certain marine bacteria that might be hitching a ride, said Kaety Hildenbrand, of Oregon State University Sea Grant Extension, which has been receiving calls from concerned consumers.

The thing to remember, said Hildenbrand, who works with coastal fishing communities, is that “glowing” shrimp is not a health risk and doesn’t reflect mishandling during processing.

I love some of the comments, such as:

“This seems to be a banner year for glowing seafood,…”

The following remark strikes me as very odd:

It’s also possible that there has been no increase in glowing seafood — just an increase in the number of people noticing it. That raises another question: Are more people cooking seafood without lights?

Complete story here.

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.

I’ve been keeping an animal journal, which I posted about on Women Of Esoterica awhile back. My intent was to write about animals, but I soon realized that “animal” means a lot of things other than the expected. Last night I was writing in my journal about cryptids, shape shifters, mixed energies, inter-dimensional beings…I’m pretty sure this will turn into something. I had the following dream after writing in my journal last night:

I go see about some land for sale here in Oregon. “39.4″ acres for incredibly cheap. I go alone; arriving, there is a man who’s clearly some kind of guard to this little town, which is very odd. He lets me by. He’s not armed or even threatening, but it is … odd. I continue on, meeting up with a pleasant man in his early forties, maybe. Friendly person, telling me all about the property. We’re standing in the middle of a highway. No people around or cars, out in the country. What’s extremely weird is that, as soon as I passed the “guard” earlier, the landscape changed radically. Suddenly, I am surrounded by high, sharp, jutting mountains covered in snow, it’s cold, the water (ocean? lake?) on one side of the highway, surrounded by these very high and close mountains, is grey and choppy. I’m a little nervous, the water is almost up to the road. And on the other side of the highway, across from the water and mountains, the land just goes straight up, very steep. I’m told this is “Wyoming-Idaho” in Oregon. I say, in the dream, (a lucid moment?) that there’s no such thing, and what is Wyoming doing in Oregon?! The man thinks that’s funny.

He continues telling me bout the land, that’s it’s a great deal (it is), it’s all just land, but one thing to be aware: there are poachers that “encroach on the edges,” as he puts it. I’ll have to deal with them as I see fit, he says.

As we’re talking, suddenly a man in what is obviously a very bad, very cheap Bigfoot costume, (light grey in color) steps out onto the road. The man says, in a mock frightened tone, “Oh, look, look! It’s Bigfoot! Bigfoot is here!” and they both crack up. The guy in the BF suit goofs around, stomping and clowning, and then takes off.

All this time I am not amused, and am just looking at them. The man says to me,”You don’t think that’s funny?” and I’m thinking to myself, what a maroon, another joker, and a Bigfoot debunker. Great. But I’m not going to tell him about my opinions on Bigfoot, or anything else.

Then the man says to me, very seriously, “You know, around here, we all know Bigfoot exists. Anyone who’s ever spent any time in the country around here knows damn well Bigfoot exists. You can’t judge people on things like having fun.”

Well okay then, I think. Interesting. So back to the land issue, but I tell him that I don’t like the snow, or mountains, and I still don’t like this idea of “Wyoming” being in Idaho-Oregon, and on the west coast to boot. It’s all very suspicious. And why are all the townspeople, who I know are all around us, watching us, hidden? It’s not that they’re sinister or of ill intent but it is weird and I’m uncomfortable.

The man says to me, “You didn’t think the property was this place, did you? Oh no, it’s not like this at all, it’s back behind here,” and he waves his hands around, indicating that the land is even further, and not snowy or mountainous.

I tell him I’ll think about it, and tell him I have to leave. He stays there, I’m a little put out he’s letting me go off on my own, after all, I don’t know my way around. He stays put on the highway, as if he’s under some type of interdiction to stay in that place. I find my way though and back to the guard, who also seems amused that I’m here. He doesn’t help me with directions either, but I figure it out.

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?”

The Eugene Weekly is a free “alternative” paper that’s been around for many years. Eons ago it was called What’s Happening but they changed the name to get rid of that PNW hippie vibe.

Writer Rick Levin wrote a fairly in depth article on the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium. It’s always good to see articles on fringe topics. At the same time, in my personal non-scientific observations, the liberal/left often mocks and rejects topics like this. Secular humanism, or who knows. There’s exceptions of course, in fact, a local UFO group that seems to be more concerned with energy and disclosure than UFOs and related topics — always bringing it back around to a political agenda I still haven’t figured out — are, for the most part, liberal leaning. It’s just something I’ve noticed; that usually, liberals just don’t take things like this seriously, make fun of New Age stuff, and so on. I know, I make fun of New Age stuff, (and yeah, I’m a left leaning hippie) but that’s my issue. I’m also a bit New Agey, so it’s my way of coping with my own crystal crunching nature.

Levin acknowledges listening to Coast to Coast every night, yet he’s a non-believer in esoteric and fringe subjects. And, he has a decidedly classist view of the Coast to Coast audience:

I’ve always pictured the generic caller as looking like a backcountry cross between Ted Nugent and Zippy the Pinhead, and paranoid to the point of psychosis. It’s a grossly unfair portrait, I know, but there it is.

When people say that however, after they’ve listened to several witness accounts, I always want to ask them: “But, what did you think of those stories?” Do you think the witness is a liar? A fool? Mistaking a bear for a Bigfoot? Been out in the woods too long? What? The same question can be asked of the UFO skeptic: okay, after hearing the stories of a dozen or more people, “What do you think of them?”

Not what do you think in general, or anything else, but what’s your direct response to the witness and his or her account?

I don’t think he can get to that point. He has, he writes, been given plenty of information on Bigfoot over the years, but he’s not buying. He didn’t believe in Santa Claus as a child, he says, and he doesn’t do Bigfoot today:

A lot of amateur sasquatch research employs a forced, mangled scientific jargon that sounds silly, and there are conclusions drawn that make a Swiss cheese of logic. And the more touchy-feely bigfoot writing heaps on the nativist hoo-haw and New Age fluff like so much whipped cream spooned atop the honky appropriation of indigenous myth.

He prefers to by-pass witness accounts, comparing Bigfoot encounters to Biblical accounts:

That said, it’s just as difficult to prove, scientifically speaking, the reality of burning bushes, parted seas, 40-day floods and a six-day work week where God cooked up heaven and earth, yet hoards of people continue to believe these things heart and soul. As both legend and contested reality, the real source of bigfoot’s appeal, like the source of the Bible’s appeal, is anecdotal — as a fable filled with wonder, suspense and local color, all ringed with a halo of otherworldliness.

“The real source of Bigfoot’s appeal…?” His opinion but speak for yourself. I’ve never seen a Bigfoot but I choose to believe the people I know and trust, who’ve chosen to share with me their stories of seeing a Sasquatch. Simple. Like most skeptics, whether it’s UFOs or what, they do this weird dance thing around the topic they reject. They don’t think much of it, often don’t know much about it, certainly aren’t of the opinion it exists, yet they have all kinds of ideas about what it is, means, represents, symbolizes, is capable of . . .

Levin gives a good account of Dave Rodriquez’s encounters, and yet, after describing those encounters, Levin doesn’t stop to think about those sightings. Did he think Rodriquez was lying? Mistaken? No, it seems Levin projects much; as with his comparison of the Bible and folklore to Bigfoot encounters, he offers his reasons why people tell stories about seeing Bigfoot:

At the Oregon Sasquatch Symposium, people told stories in order to prove that something else lives despite mountains of doubt and a lack of palpable proof, which is something akin to the religious impulse compelling converts to proselytize.

It’s just a loop; “mountains of doubt” disappear once you’ve seen a Bigfoot.

Maybe I’m being too hard on Levin. He does treat the speakers and the conference with respect, which is appreciated, and is honest in his feelings. And he ends by saying … well, read it for yourself.