Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘animals’

Echoes of Hitchcock and owl-as-alien-guide-to-liminal-experiences, Strange Owl Groups & CWD Found In MO Deer Short-Eared Owls By The Hundreds,
by Larry Dablemont on Rense.com reports strange owl sightings in Greenfield, Mo. Dablemont hosts a local nature radio program and writes he’s never heard of owls congregating in large numbers, and in daylight. Very weird. Dablemont writes:

A couple of weeks ago a gentleman from Greenfield, Mo. called in, and identified himself as Faren Fite. I thought for a moment it was some kind of hoax call, because he said he had seen around 200 owls the day before in one small area between Greenfield and Lockwood. He said that on one corral fence there were more than thirty in a group!

Photos of the owls here.

It was a huge group of short-eared owls, a species a little bit like the barred owl in size and appearance. But in habit, they are much different than most of the owls we are accustomed to hearing and seeing in the Ozarks. They have a mean look to them, with ornery-looking bright yellow eyes rather than the brown eyes the barred owl has. And the face is much different, with a pronounced circle of feathers, contrasting white and dark brown, and two little feather patches referred to as “ears”, which are much like the horns on a horned owl.

Dablemort also reports on cases of Chronic Wasting Disease, which, sadly and spookily, is being found in deer and other wildlife in the U.S:

Finally, mad-deer disease, or Chronic Wasting Disease, has come to Missouri, right where I predicted it would first be found, in one of those deer pens where they try to raise giant antlers by feeding an herbivorous creature a diet that includes meat by-products

Authorities deny there is anything harmful in CWD (well, to humans anyway, apparently the animals don’t count.)

Strange Planet has a good post about the recent earthquakes, including yesterday’s 8.8 earthquake in Chile. As Strange Planet points out:

 An 8.8 compared to Japan’s 7.0 is not a quake 1.8 times the intensity, as many of you know. It’s exponentially horrific. A 7.1 is ten times the power of a 7.0, a 7.2 is ten times a 7.1, and so on.

When the sea lions left the San Fransico area, I posted that they left for a reason, and I said that they left because of soon to be witnesses earthquakes. Strange Planet also wonders, as I did last night when I heard the news, if the OCR attack on his trainer wasn’t in some ways due to the earthquakes. Giant squid washing up on beaches all up and down the coast, and other unusual marine life behaviors — we’ve been witnessing this recently. A combination of factors, including global warming/climate changes, which the earthquakes are a part of.

As to the orca Tilkumat and the death of his trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld and that tragedy, part of that tragedy is that whales and other creatures (big cats, elephants, etc.) are kept in captivity in the first place. Strange Planet comments:

 Several days ago, there’s the sad incident at Sea World in Orlando, Florida, where a trainer was killed by a 12,000lb. OCR. Reps for the park called it a deadly misstep on the trainer’s part, leaving her ponytail wagging in the water, signaling the animal to seize it as a ‘toy’. Could be. Could also be that he wants out of this bathtub and back into the wild, and that he also sensed something out there. Because if you remember, in the interviews that followed with the staff, they said all of the animals were behaving strangely, were agitated, and just weren’t performing as they know how. There’s something deeper there. [italics mine]

There certainly is “something deeper there.”

The tragic end of Keiko (the orca known as “Free Willy” and kept at the Newport, Oregon aquarium until his release into the ocean) is not something I want to see happen again. I don’t know if releasing Tilikum the orca (I will not use the exploitive and titillating term “killer whale”) back to the ocean is the right thing to do. Maybe it is, I honestly don’t know. A start to prevent these tragedies, and, to simply prevent the imprisonment of sentient beings like orcas in the first place, is to make it illegal to keep these creatures in captivity.

As to the events occurring now, local news (Eugene, Oregon, about 50 miles inland) tells us of tsunami warnings on the Oregon coast because of the earthquakes in Chile and Japan. According to the KEZI news website:

The National Weather Service has issued a tsunami advisory for the Oregon coastal area.  Coastal residents are advised to stay out of the water, off the beach, and away from harbors and marinas.

This is not a watch or warning. No significant coastal flooding is expected to  be produced by this wave.  However, some areas of the coast could experience dangerous currents and surges in harbors and bays due to this tsunami. [a href=”http://kezi.com/news/local/164262”> Massive Quake Prompts Tsunami Advisory For Oregon Coast

I heard about the earthquake in Chile from Ian Punnett on C2C. He said there weren’t any details but that the news was, an 8.5 (at the time, that’s what was reported; today’s paper said it was 8.8) earthquake in Chile. So I turned on the TV, with our roughly 250 channels, and I couldn’t find one news program. 11:30ish pm, and not one news program. I mean news, like the old CNN, where you had simple, straight forward information coming in about what was going on in the world. What I found were “news” shows having to do with entertainment, news shows, of a sort, with a host or two but clearly the show was about them, and what they wanted to focus on, which seemed mostly to be the tragedy at SeaWorld. The most news I got was from the Weather Channel.

In an odd bit of juxtapositioning, the following item was in today’s local news about Oregon’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport: State OKs money for Oregon marine mammal center:

Assuming Gov. Ted Kulongoski signs the bill, researchers at Hatfield hope that amount will be enough to win $16 million in federal funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also called NIST. Combined, that would be $25 million, enough to build the new center.

“This would establish a unique center, a university-based center for the study of marine mammals,” said Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute. “It would be the largest in the U.S.

“It will give us the unique capacity to advance technology for the study of and protection of marine mammals, including satellite tagging, advanced studies of life history and analyses of genetics diversity.”

As with the people of Haiti, my prayers and thoughts go to those in Chile as well.

In my previous post about Oregon columnist Bob Welch’s piece on praising The Lord before partaking of bison, wild cow, nutria, lemon peppered cougar and bear, I mentioned that Welch had written a column about Bigfoot. The column is reprinted on the Bigfoot Encounters website, with comments about Welch’s column. Here it is, from March of 2002:Bob Welch: Tall, tall tales equal Bigfoot The column, inspired by Welchs reading Bigfoot at 50: Evaluating a Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence. in theSkeptical Inquirer. Welch basically follows the uber skeptic mindset concerning Bigfoot and basically parroting their stand on Bigfoot. Commenting that one almost wants to be a “dreamer” and believe in Bigfoot, it just can’t be:

But you can’t.

Why not? Because the idea is so bizarre? Nope. Bizarreness shouldn’t preclude belief in something. People believe in all sorts of bizarre concepts, from God to gravity to Oregon’s home football uniforms.

No, the real reason you can’t believe is because most of the “water-tight” evidence leaks like your 25-year-old gutters. To wit:

And then he lists the skeptic response of, basically “no evidence” and quotes skeptic Benjamin Radford.

Bob Welch is a columnist for the Register-Guard, Eugene-Springfield area’s local newspaper. It’s a mainstream column; Welch likes sports a whole lot, and writes about so-called human interest type stories in the area. He isn’t out there at all, (I remember a column he wrote some years ago where he made insipid fun of Bigfoot witnesses, yuck yuck) so it’s that kind of thing.

He had an little moment of synchronicty the other day which inspired him to ask readers to share their interesting odd moments involving synchronicty.(Mysterious, magical or just weird? ) In his recent column Mysterious, eerie events remembered
he shares some of those responses. My favorites: the story about feral cats in Hawaii, and the coach in Harrisburg who had a ghostly encounter with his mother.

Not to pick on Welch (though I’m not a fan particularly) but in another column, as well as a very different kind of column, he writes about a wild game feast in Potluck’s food is, well, a little wild At no point during the article does he address the ethical issues; it’s simply a golly gee kind of piece about, in a surreal juxtaposition, a local country church’s annual game meat fest:

The setting is beautiful, quintessential Americana, a white church steeple rising into the sky amid trees, fields and rolling hills about five miles northwest of Monroe.

The dress is primarily, well, camouflage.

And the décor is what I’d call country fish & game: guns, pelts, poles, antlers, traps, duck decoys and two giant elk mounts, including emcee Scott Ballard’s world-record “8 by 9” Roosevelt elk — eight points on one side of the rack, nine on the other.

After the prayer, we head through the kitchen to go through the potluck line.

The whole scene is bizarre; prayer, camouflage, dead animals on the walls as well as on plates, and the contrast between the country and the gun toting hunters.

Among the food offered: bear, bison, wild cow soup, Nutria, elk, and lemon pepper cougar. And among the door prizes for the event: waterproof Bibles.

According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, there is a moose population in Oregon’s Blue Mountains in the eastern part of the state. The moose population is small; about 60 altogether. Moose have been spotted for a few decades but “only recently have animals been considered established residents.” says the ODFW site. Unfortunately, Oregon’s moose might have a parasite that can be fatal. Scientists aren’t sure the parasite is the cause; they speculate the deaths of the Oregon moose were caused by a parasite found in Wyoming moose that killed some of the animals there:

“We lost two of our radioed animals this summer, and we could never determine the cause of death,” said Pat Matthews, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. “So this sort of jumped out as a possibility.” (Register Guard)

While the deaths are worrisome, and there are indicators that the parasite might be the cause of death, the herd in Oregon does seem to be thriving.

Sources:
The Oregonian:Oregon biologists fear small moose herd may be infected with deadly parasite

Moose on the Loose!

Register-Guard:Oregon biologists look into moose deaths

Kym Pokorny, for the Oregonian, makes it clear in her article Mix of gardens and guns is, well, just wrong she isn’t against guns, exactly, but finds the combination of guns and gardens bizarre. I concur.

It feels surreal to peruse the magazine’s Web site. The “About Us” section says, “Garden & Gun” is a Southern lifestyle magazine that’s all about the magic of the new South – the sporting culture, the food, the music, the art, the literature, the people, and the ideas. It espouses a strong conservation ethic that grows out of its connection to the land, and it reveals the beauty of the South.”


Well, hmmm. I guess the gun part comes with the sporting culture. I can’t really see bloody carcasses as part of the beauty of anything, but, then, that’s me. And I don’t really think they run photos of any dead things.

The mix of stories is weird: a guy in Atlanta who grows 43 different varieties of boxwood; letting your wife choose your “hard-core gun dog” (that’s wrong on so many levels); farmers and environmentalists joining forces to bring back the bison; a company that rebuilds shotguns.

More here.

Update to my previous post on the squid invasion in Seaside, Oregon. Here’s a video of the squid. Thanks to Professor Hex for the link.

I posted this in June of this year on my Trickster Northwest blog, which I’m in the process of merging into a couple of my other blogs, like this one here at Oregon L.O.W.F.I.  Here you go: Radioactive Wasps:

Yakima, Washington, has a haunted history, full of Fortean stuff. The area is known for UFOs, weird “batsquatch” type sightings; all kinds of unusual phenomena. Adding to the list of high strangeness is this news item on radioactive wasps:Radioactive wasps bug out nuclear cleanup workers:
<blockquote>
YAKIMA, Wash. – If workers cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site didn’t have enough to worry about, now they’ve got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington’s Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003.

That’s when workers finished covering cleaned-up waste sites with fresh topsoil, native plants and straw to help the plants grow — inadvertently creating perfect ground cover for the insects to build their nests. Nearby cleanup work also provided a steady supply of mud, which the wasps used as building material.

Today, the nests, which could number in the thousands, are “fairly highly contaminated” with radioactive isotopes, such as cesium and cobalt, but don’t pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.</blockquote>

Supposedly the wasps are “long gone” it’s just the nests that are a worry. Uh-huh.

<a href=”http://www.kval.com/news/local/79115852.html”>Giant squid are washing up on the Oregon coast, in the Seaside </a> (which happens to be my mother’s birthplace; my grandfather was a mayor in the town decades ago) area.

The Anomalist featured a link today from the Forgetomori blog: A Fishy “Space Monster.” The post is from November, and shares the following:

Mikhail Gershtein, from St. Petersburg, Russia, sent me the “beautiful” alien scan above, from James Moseley’s Saucer News, Vol14 N4, 1967-68.

It’s a “’Space Monster’ allegedly found recently in Russia by a farmer named Vasily Dubichev”. The source for such spectacular story? “The Feb 26 edition of the National Examiner”. Not exactly (or perhaps exactly) where you would expect this kind of news to come from.

The image from Saucer News reminded me of the 2007 story, also from Russia, about an “alien fish” found by Russian fisherman. I wrote about it for UFO Digest in February of 2007: Squeaking Alien Eaten: UFOs and High Strangeness in Rostov, Russia:

According to the account in Pravda, fisherman in Rostov, Russia, caught a strange “shark-looking” creature. Images of the weird creature were taken with a cell phone. Then they ate it. The logic being, in part anyway, that they weren’t “scared” of the creature, so saw no reason not to eat it. It was quite delectable, too, according to one of the fisherman.

In typical Trickster fashion, where odd coincidences and relationships exist in the land of anomalies and UFOs, we find that Rostov, and the surrounding areas, have seen its share of UFOs and strange creatures.

Picture of the “alien” found in Russia

Rostov, Russia has its share of UFO sightings and related events, going back decades. (Rostov is in the North Caucasus region, and borders the Vorenezh region, also Ukraine.) Any internet search will turn up lots of interesting cases. Undoubtedly many of the UFOs seen were, and are, military objects from within Russia as well as outside the country. But overall, there are a high number of UFO cases that occurred in the Rostov region. A random and short sampling:
Liudmila Goryacheva filmed a UFO in Rostov; the sighting was picked up by the Rostov and Moscow news agencies. The sightings continued for a month.(Flier’s Files)

But probably the most well known case is the September 27, 1989 Voronezh, Russia entity and UFO sighting. Several children saw a nine foot, three eyed-entity, accompanied by a robotic being of some kind. The UFO landed just outside the city of Voronezh, and, like something from The Day the Earth Stood Still, the alien shot a weapon at one of the witnesses. This incident is problematic in many ways, but it is clear something very weird and highly unusual happened. In some ways it reminds me of Marian apparitions, witnessed by children, with accompanying high strangeness.

Following the bad vintage monster movie theme, I found the monster from the 1958 movie It Conquered the World similar to the Russian alien fish. Lots of fun clips on You Tube: It Conquered The World