Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘Oregon Coast’

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.

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.

                      Heceta Head Lighthouse Bed and Breakfast, Florence, Oregon 
                           manipulated photograph/mixed media, Regan Lee 2005 


This is an image of the Heceta Head lighthouse keeper’s home in Florence, Oregon. The house is now a bed and breakfast. The lighthouse is available to visit; tours are given. It’s a bit of a hike up to the lighthouse but worth it.


The house is said to be haunted. There have been several articles written through the years in both local and national publications on the haunted house. I know a few people who’ve stayed there who’ve told me they either felt or saw ghostly type things. 


While I’ve been to the lighthouse, I haven’t been inside the bed and breakfast. Unless you’re staying at the inn, you can’t go inside just to look around. Which is nice to know; you can’t disturb the guests that way. Maybe some day we’ll try staying there.


I manipulated the photograph I took using mixed materials: acrylic paint, oil pastels. It’s been so long since I took this I’m not sure what camera I used; either a disposable or my Instamatic, which I like to use for some silly reason, even though I have digitals and other cameras.

           Heceta Head Lighthouse, Florence, Oregon, manipulated photograph by Regan Lee
This blue image is of the lighthouse itself. Just a photograph (most likely the same camera was used but as I say, don’t remember) that I had fun playing with by altering the color via the computer. 



Never seen a ghost or anything unusual or esoteric when I’ve been up there, but there’s always next time!

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.

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.

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.)

The other day I posted about the coyote population inside the city limits of the coastal town of Newport, Oregon. In fact, as I wrote, a coyote has been seen by several people on the street over from my mother’s house. For whatever reason I never thought of coyotes in the area, certainly not right in town, a couple blocks from the touristy Nye Beach area. Deer are common, and there was the black bear story awhile back along the Yaquina River (woman was sentenced to leave her home and not return to the area for feeding a large population of black bears.)

Much closer to home, as in no more than five miles from here, a report in the local paper about cougar in the well traveled Spencer’s Butte park. That location is heavily used by hikers, bikers, nature lovers, etc. From the Register Guard, the area’s newspaper:

<a href=”http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/cityregion/24574682-41/butdorf-butte-cougar-cougars-sign.csp”> Hazardous hike | Warning signs are posted after hikers spot three cougars while climbing Spencer Butte </a>
They did what they were supposed to do. They didn’t run. They walked slowly. They shouted. Loud and often.

“My whole body was full of adrenaline,” said Julie Butdorf, a University of Oregon student who was hiking Spencer Butte about 6:30 a.m. Wednesday with fellow student and roommate Jenna Rosenfeld when they came upon what they are sure was a cougar a few feet off the trail. And then another. And another.

“There were at least three of them,” Butdorf said.

They made it safely back to their car and called the authorities, who ended up posting a warning sign in the area.

There’s been a lot of controversy in this area about laws pertaining to cougar hunting, especially trap laws and the use of dogs in hunting cougar. No doubt this incident will bring the issue up yet again.

Cougar in the Spencer Butte area are “rare,” according to ODFW’s  Brian Wolfer. However, the agency gets reports of cougar sightings in theresidential streets around the park. (A few years ago the paper had a photograph of a cougar in a tree on the University of Oregon campus; much closer to home than Spencer Butte park!)

Warning have been issued to stay out of the park, and signs put up about cougar. Yet human nature demonstrates that some people either have no fear, are too thrilled by the possibility of spotting a cougar up close, or, excuse me, stupid:

The warning signs didn’t stop folks from hiking the butte later Wednesday, although most went with caution.

“Where’s the sign?” said Myke Leopold of Marcola. “I need to read it.” Leopold, who’s hiked the butte a half-dozen times, brought along a friend Wednesday, Victoria Aguirre of Medford, who was getting set to hike the 2,065-foot butte for the first time.

“It’s daytime,” Aguirre said. “They usually come out at night, right?”

True, according to ODFW’s Brian Wolfer (and note the Fortean name game of his last name) and, cougars don’t usually attack humans, yet they have.

This one really got me:

Kerry Lennartz, also a UO student, heard about the sighting from a friend Wednesday morning. But that didn’t stop her from taking her weekly walk with her dog, Rozzie, a Shiba Inu. “It’s the middle of the day, so I figured it would be OK,” Lennartz said.

Besides, she’s worked with wildcats at a rescue center in her home state of Indiana, she said. She’s even touched a cougar.

“They’re really sweet in captivity,” Lennartz said. “They purr.”

“In captivity” animals are different than they are in the wild, and I’m not so sure about bringing a dog into the mix. I’m staying out of the park, not that I go up there much anyway, except to look for UFOs. The Spencer Butte area is also known as a Eugene UFO hot spot; and, in fact, I’ve seen a few UFOs in that area over the years.

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.

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.