Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘Lincoln County’

Oregon beaches have been experiencing coyotes on the beaches for awhile now. I wrote about coyotes in the Newport area in May of 2010, for Oreogn L.O.W.F.I. I’ve heard them at night; it’s both a cool and an eerie sound to hear them so close, and right on the beach. But, like bear and deer in the area, the coyotes in human developed areas are a problem, for both humans and animals. There’s the reason why bear, deer, coyote, etc. are “infringing” in human populated areas. The animal’s habitat is being decreased, the animals move in. There are other reasons as well: for example, humans feeding wildlife, particularly bears. A Yachats, Oregon women was found guilty of feeding bears on her property; she was banned from living in the area) as I also blogged on L.O.W.F.I.

On Thursday, a five year old was bitten by a coyote on the beach in Nehalem State Park. (Nehalem is on the coast.) Wildlife authorities shot and killed the coyote; the child is undergoing a rabies shots series.

People feed the birds bread, popcorn, and junk food, which is very bad for the birds. Very bad. Please don’t do it.

Sharnelle Fee, director of state department’s Wildlife Center of the North Coast, said she has treated pelicans who have eaten hot dogs, doughnuts, potato chips and even chicken bones.
“When you have a hungry pelican, they’re going to eat anything you put in front of them,” Fee said. “These kinds of foods can actually kill them.”
Scientists advise people to avoid feeding any wildlife, but they are particularly strident in their appeals about pelicans because the availability of human food may be encouraging them to stay on the north coast during the winter instead of heading south to their Baja California breeding grounds.

The article also notes that the brown pelicans have been hanging around on the Oregon coast (we saw some a couple of years ago in November in Yachats) and they don’t know why that is. Climate changes/global warming wouldn’t have anything to do with it I suppose…

The day before yesterday all four of our cats were behaving very strangely. I even said to Jim that I wondered if there was an earthquake coming soon, because they were just so “off” — not their usual routine.Very agitated and confused, literally walking in circles sometimes. (In a weird way, not the usual that’s what cats do way.) Each cat has their own personality and what bothers one may not bother the other, but that day, they were all just crazy. Well, turns out there were earthquakes, several,  in the area: the Eugene (where I live) and surrounding area, sort of I-5 corridor, extending to the North up towards Portland area, which is about 100 miles from Eugene, and to the south, near Medford:

August 3rd: The Eugene area where I live, had a 1.1.

August 3rd, a 1.6.

August 3rd, 2.1 McMinnville area

August 4th, 2.1

August 5,th 2.2 (southern Oregon)

August 5,th 4.5 off Oregon coast 235 miles off the coast of Newport

(You can read the local news item about the earthquake off the coast, with an interesting comment by a reader who remarks his own animals were acting very strangely.)

Yachats, OR 2010 photo by Regan Lee

My new Trickster’s Realm column is up at Binnall of America. Here’s an excerpt, for more, visit BoA!

Some eerie and strange things have been happening on the Oregon coast these past few weeks. While mostly mundane in nature,there’s an aura of weirdness about these events. Climate change, global warming, weather patterns, the aftermath of BP’s disaster in the Gulf, toxins in the ocean, and general earth rage-madness have come together, sending us signals that things are very wrong, and very different from what we’ve known. Things are wilder, more chaotic, sadder, and stranger. Warnings and omens that are wake-up calls to be sure.

Tillamook

A November 6th item in local news: Oregon crabbers in the Tillamook area are facing a dangerous season, more so than the usual: Dangerous crab season puts rescuers on alert Tillamook has a history of wildness; dangerous ocean, haunted waters, the deaths of men fighting the rough ocean while building the Tillamook Lighthouse in 1880. Native American legends of the area tell of spirits in the water and haunted underwater/underground tunnels. The lighthouse is now privately owned, but that hasn’t stopped the tragic and haunted history, for it became a columbarium. But, even that is not entirely true, according to Our Oregon Coast website:

After interring about 30 urns, the columbarium’s license was revoked in 1999 by the Oregon Mortuary and Cemetery Board and was rejected upon reapplication in 2005. The board said the owners have not kept accurate records and, because urns sit on boards and concrete blocks and not in niches, the lighthouse does not even qualify as a columbarium.

As for the crabbers in the Tillamook area, fishermen know of the dangers and that’s not news, but the danger has been escalating:

We’ve lost a lot of boats,” said Mike Saindon, master chief petty officer in Garibaldi. “It is a very dangerous place and it has been for awhile. Conditions are bad and they have been getting worse over the years. No one knows why that’s happening.”The Tillamook Bay bar — the place at the tip of the jetties where the calm bay waters meet the sea — has been growing progressively worse for about 20 years.

“Traditionally when you get a lot of water flowing it clears the channels out,” said Saindon. “That isn’t happening here. The sand builds up on the bar and causes waves to break more frequently and in a larger area. That creates a larger surf zone and not a clear channel.”

The coastal town of Florence in Oregon has its Elvis brush with fame:
Elvis enjoyed the small town atmosphere of Florence back in the day’

And I had my own brush with Elvis, as I recently wrote about for UFO Mystic: My Claim to UFO-Hollywood Fame.

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 was delighted to see this in our local paper — a pod of orcas in the Yaquina Bay, here in Oregon. I’m so sad I didn’t get to witness this! I have friends and family there and am there frequently, just not this time! But how wonderful for the community to have this happen! A rare sight:
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/06/a_rare_sight_killer_whales_swi.html:

NEWPORT — It’s the sight some here wait years, even decades to see, and Thursday a whole lot of  people got their wish when a pod of orca whales cruised over the Yaquina Bay Bar, under the bridge and kept on all the way past the port, docks and Bayfront right on up the river.

The blogThe Big Studyhas an interesting piece on the behavior of light; anomalous, high strangeness and unexplained events having to do with light. Included in the article is a bit about the Reeves case from the 1960s in the Newport-Toledo area on the Oregon coast. Called the Reeves case, the Toledo lights case, etc. or the Toledo Donuts… Keel wrote about this and a few mentions can be found here and there. To this day, the event reamains unexplained.

A possible explanation, in my opinion, is a military test of classified technology. UFO sightings were happening all over the area; and the navy and research facilities have a strong presence there. On the other hand, the Reeves case echoes other strange, out of place type “aliens,” type encounters. Maybe there is no rational explanation; it just is one more of those strange visitations that pop in from the “Goblin Universe,” (Holiday) or “Daemonic Reality,” (Harpur) or Trickster realm. (Hansen.)

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.

Naveed on his blog Naveed’s Realm has an interesting item about the legend of the monster in Devil’s Lake in Lincoln City, Oregon.

The short story as for as the Oregon one goes is that the Siletz Indian tribe centuries ago used to really like of the area of Devil’s Lake. Then one night when a group of warriors was dispatched across the lake, massive tentacles burst forth from the waters destroying the canoes. The warriors where then flung around, beaten against the water and debris, and died from drowning or injury. From then on the lake was called Devil’s Lake.

Was the “monster” a squid, or is the story only a myth to explain the dangers of the area?