Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Coast to Coast shares a photo of a large redwood carving of a Bigfoot made for a new bar and grill opening in Kerby, Oregon.

Kerby is in Southern Oregon, Josephine County, near the California border. Population: 400.

The bar owner says the Bigfoot carving needs a name; “maybe listeners can help.” Visit Coast to Coast if you feel creative.

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.

Two odd little things recently in my community concerning the swine flu. The initial hysteria and swine flu as lead news has quited awhile ago, but there is still the constant low hum of the news stream bringing us swine flu news and propaganda.

I was in line at the pharmacy the other day, and while waiting I noticed a small sign in the window about the swine flu vaccine. I’m paraphrasing but it basically looked something like this:

H1N1 Vaccines Here! No waiting! No appointment neccesary!

H1N1 Vaccinations Available For All

see if you are eligble to receive the H1N1 vaccine

Vaccine not available at this pharmacy. Please visit our Elm Street pharmacy for vaccinations.

I wondered why the vaccine is available for all, but you had to check to see if you could take it, and why the sign read that you could get it at my pharmacy, but they were out, you had to actully go a different pharmacy to get vaccinated. I took a picture of the sign with my digital. I checked my menu to make sure the image was there; it was. When I went to show the image to Jim, it was gone. We both looked but it wasn’t in the camera. No, I’m not suggesting alien reptilians were responsible, just a weird little thing. No doubt I hit the delete button or something while putting the camera away.

A few days later, Jim tells me that he saw a man in front of the Public Health Department on 6th waving a large sign. The sign read (paraphrasing again):

Come on in! Get your FREE Swine Flu vaccine here!

As Jim commented, they really want us to get vaccinated.

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

Russian sky and space weirdness continues. We’ve had the Blue Spiral (”failed Russian missile”), pyramid UFOs over the Kremlin, and now this: news from Russia’s space agency that it plans to:

knock a large asteroid off course and reduce the chances of earth impact, even though U.S. scientists say such a scenario is unlikely.

The asteroid is Apophis; 885 foot (give or take I’m sure) object that isn’t worrying US scientists much:

NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000.

NASA said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.

“It wasn’t anything to worry about before. Now it’s even less so,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Russia sees things differently:

Without mentioning NASA’s conclusions, Perminov said that he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said.

“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Perminov said.

Russia’s space agency feels confident they can build what they need to build in time, and successfully complete their mission. But this last statement, by the Institute of Astronomy Director Boris Shustov, is cryptic:

“Apophis is just a symbolic example, there are many other dangerous objects we know little about”

The juicy invitation to speculate that this comment hands us is too interesting to ignore … UFOs? Disclosure? War? Political posturing? Staged events: religious, alien, etc?

“Apophis” is the Egyptian:

demon serpent of darkness whom Ra, as sun god, destroys every morning at dawn

What we can’t do with that fun fact of esoteric imagery! (Remember the recent BVM apparition in Egypt earlier this month.)  In the context of the already mentioned Russian displays, the plans to plan to plan an attack on Apophis, combined with Shustov’s comment, we can expect more Fortean and generally weird things to come surrouding Russia.

Notes

Russia may send spacecraft to knock away asteroid

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/eu_russia_asteroid_encounter

Infoplease

http://dictionary.infoplease.com/apophis

Apophis, Enemy of Re

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/apep.htm