Oregon L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘sacrifice’

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.

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 started a new blog: Animal Forteana.

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.

New York City is a long way from Eugene, Oregon, but this story has my interest for these reasons: it’s related to my earlier post about coyotes seen in residential areas in Newport, Oregon, on the coast (literally, coyotes on the beach), and I’m interested in stories of wild animals interfacing with humans, or, vice versa.

Also, it seems that in the past few years, stories of known animals — meaning, mundane, recognizable creatures as compared to unknown, anomalous, cryptid types — behaving more boldly as well as more strangely, have increased. I noticed this pattern about ten, twelve years ago. For some reason I started collecting news clippings and stories of strange animal behaviors. When I told one of my professors about this he agreed it was certainly interesting, but wanted to know so what; what was I going to do with these stories, why was I collecting them? “Because they’re cool and weird” wasn’t enough of a motivation. Well, I still don’t know what I want to do with these stories, except to share them, for now.

So, we have coyotes in New York city. Part of my fascination of stories like this is the juxtaposition of humans, especially in places so seemingly out of touch with “the wild,” even though “the wild,” may be less than fifty miles away. Well dressed people eating perfect food in lovely places, and two blocks away are coyotes. Or deer, or bear or wolverines or cougars or . . .

Even in places not so la de dah as New York City, like Newport, Oregon, the juxtaposition still fascinates. Newport is a funky yet somewhat large beach town, (not a criticism) where, however, “gentrification” is going on in some areas. Expensive condos and too too cute and over priced shops are shoved up against older and poorer homes, often in disrepair. And just a few miles away from the touristy beach spots are the rural areas; some poor, some with one way glass windows wrapping around beautiful homes atop hills, and some in between. Add to this the presence of animals coming down from the hills, or out of the forests, onto the boardwalks and surrounding neighborhoods seems like both poetic justice in some ways, as well as tragic for the animals. Obviously their presence is a sign of what’s happening to their environment and the effect that has on the animals.

Well that was gloomy. I didn’t intend it to turn out that way, it just did. Maybe it’s because right now it’s a dark, rainy, windy cold day here in Oregon. Not at all unusual for western Oregon, true. . .

So, back to the coyotes in New York. This recent news items tells about a captured coyote in the city: Not wily enough: Cops corral roving Tribeca coyote along West Side Highway.

New York’s runaway coyote has been corralled.

The elusive animal was finally nabbed in Tribeca on Thursday after cops found it in a parking lot near the West Side Highway.

“He didn’t seem too Wily by the time we found him,” said Detective James Coll, who collared the coyote with Detective Robert Mirfield.

Limo driver Ralph Rothstein, 63, who witnessed the capture, said the creature “had one ear up and one ear down, like a cartoon character, and didn’t know which way to go.

“I was reading about it earlier in the day then, all of a sudden, I see the coyote and I couldn’t believe it…It looked scared,” he added.

Naturally the poor thing was scared! Fortunately the coyote is in the hands of animal caretakers and will be released into the wild. Other coyotes have been seen — and captured — in New York City over the last five years or so.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/03/25/2010-03-25_not_wiley_enough_cops_corral_roving_tribeca_coyote_along_west_side_highway.html#ixzz0jIfHWU3N

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.

Thanks go to the blog piglipstick, where I acknowledge lifting items from on a daily basis. (If you haven’t visited piglipstick be sure you do so.)

So, piglipstick alerts us to an item out of Medford, Oregon, courtesy of Information Liberation:

Oregon Officials Consult Precogs, Arrest Man for Bloody Shooting Spree That Killed Four Next Week

Yes, you read that right: “that killled four next week.” How could that happen, you ask? Have we discovered time travel? Not yet, but various law agencies got together and decided a “recently laid-off employee” from the Oregon Dept. of Transportation was “disgruntled” enough to cause suspicion. The man had bought three guns and this, combined with his termination and the “red flags” raised by co-workers, led authorities to arrest the man (on exactly what charges?) and send him off for a psych eval. As one law enforcement spokesperson said:

“Instead of being reactive, we took a proactive approach.”

As the article comments, maybe this man was indeed ready to do something horrendous, and possibly lives were saved. The obvious shouldn’t have to be stated, but here it goes. As pointed out in the Information Liberation piece:

But there’s a phrase we use to describe the sort of society where the police can come into your home, arrest you, commit you to a mental facility, and confiscate your legally-obtained property on no more than a hunch that you might commit some crime in the near future.

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.

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.

Thanks to Iona Miller for the link.

From Walterville, Oregon, the following item:
CIA Requests Its Own Documents From Author. Oregon writer H.P. Albarelli Jr.’s A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, has the CIA interested. The book is about the CIA’s use of:

drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help…

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.