Lives dedicated to saving animals
Saving animals is a full time job.
Sharnelle Fe holds an injured brown pelican
This state has a number of licensed rehabilitation centers specifically geared to nurse injured wildlife back to health. Sometimes they’ll be healthy enough to return to the wild, other times they’re too domesticated to set free but too wild to treat as pets.
But there’s something that often gets overlooked, even in glowing profiles like the Oregonian’s nice piece on Sharnelle Fee at the Wildlife Center of the North Coast. The central person at many of these centers rarely ever gets a vacation. Most of these centers have at their heart one or two dedicated people. Volunteers come in too. But the day-in day-out work most often falls on the dedicated person who launched the rehab center.
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Have your say on changes at Malheur Refuge
A very quick update to our Malheur Refuge Carp story: you can now influence how the national wildlife refuge plans for the future. 
The refuge is in the midst of developing a Comprehensive Conservation Plan and now is the time for the public to comment.
More on planning here.
It appears the only way to submit comments is the old fashioned way: by snail mailing a letter. The refuge website does not have an email submission form set up.
If you want to throw in your two cents on everything from how to eradicate the invasive carp to policies on public grazing or hunting, send your comments here:
Tim Bodeen, Project Leader
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
36391 Sodhouse Lane
Princeton, Oregon 97721
Another Mammoth Find
I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, or a really long deceased mammoth, but this story just keeps getting better.
Mike Full, the retired cop turned scuba-diving fossil hunter in McMinnville has scored yet another major fossil find in McMinnville. We showed you his amazing luck last season ago on Field Guide. He made an amazing find right in front of our camera during that story.
But he’s not done looking. This summer Chemeketa Community College students are helping out on the site and they’ve found a second mammoth tusk and its socket.
Mammoth tusk & socket
He’s found the first tusk and tusk socket in August of 1992, the tip of its jaw in July 1993 and the upper and lower left molars in July 1994. Here it is 2009 and now he’s found the other matching tusk & socket. They all lie close to one another and many of the pieces fit right into each other. So it’s pretty clear Mike’s discovered a single, nearly-intact mammoth which died on that spot. He couldn’t believe his luck when he found an entire mammoth tusk in the water of the South Yamhill River.
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Paradise behind the Bull Run gates…..
This is a little video I put together from a recent scouting trip. It’s not great quality (I just haphazardly shot some scenes in between my note-taking), but it’s from the Bull run watershed, which has an almost mythical status among Portlanders. For the most part, the public is restricted from entering the Bull Run in order to preserve the region’s exceptional water purity. We were able to visit, accompanied by Portland Water Bureau Staff of course, in order to survey the scene for an upcoming story. In one of the scenes you can see a remaining remnants of Portland’s original wooden water pipe…basically just a log with a bore hole drilled through it. Portland’s water used to travel through these!
If you want to see the Bull Run watershed for yourself, there IS a way. The Water Bureau offers limited, occassional public tours for the public. Check out tour oportunities http://www.portlandonline.com/water/index.cfm?c=29784
Congratulations Jonathan Nicholas
Congratulations to Jonathan Nicholas. He’s a former columnist for the Oregonian and co-founder of Cycle Oregon.
Jonathan Nicholas
Now he’s been named the winner of the 2009 Will Rogers Humanitarian Award for work that “produces tangible benefits for the community.”
In Cycle Oregon, he’s certainly helped communities all over the state. Field Guide covered Cycle Oregon as it turned 20 years old and you’ll see Jonathan midway through the story.
Cycle Oregon is much more than a bicycle ride. It has become the state’s most visible demonstration that urban and rural people can come together.
The next ride by the way is in September, crossing southern Oregon. It’s already sold out.
Volcano View From Space
With Mount St. Helens in our back yard, Northwesterners like to think they know what volcanic eruptions look like.
But until now, no one’s ever seen a major eruption from directly above the volcano.
Sarychev Peak in northern Russia erupts.
The astronauts in the International Space Station did and they have some amazing images.
See additional pictures and read more here about “the hole in the sky.”
Bighorn Controversies Flame Anew
Bighorn sheep are still dying of pneumonia in eastern Oregon and western Idaho. Field Guide covered this in October of 2008.
(More photos from our bighorn encounters here.)
Now one of the chief researchers in Idaho is under investigation and a new Idaho law proves difficult to enforce.
First, rancher Mick Carlson spotted an aging wild ram who was also very sick. Mick appeared in our story and told us how his family has raised domestic sheep for more than 80 years and relies on grazing his domestic herds on public lands. The trouble is, many scientists believe domestic sheep act as a carrier for a disease that doesn’t hurt domestics but can kill wild sheep. Mick doesn’t believe it. In the mean time, he’s been fighting to keep access to public grazing. Rocky Barker at The Idaho Statesman did a comprehensive report on how hard it is to track sick wild rams and to enforce a new state law. The law says instead of keeping domestic sheep off the wild herd’s lands, they’ll kill sick wild sheep to keep them from spreading disease around their own herds.
Bighorn Ram vs SUV
We’ve seen bighorn rams up close in the past during some Field Guide shoots.
But none has ever acted like this!
According to the post on YouTube, this encounter happened May 17, 2009 in Sinks Canyon, Wyoming. It was posted by Mark James, a sculptor and outdoorsman in Lander, Wyoming.
Déjà poo (headline too good not to borrow)
I missed this local story when it came out a month ago. But High Country news had fun with it in their latest edition.
Courtesy The Columbian
It turns out the long search for the source of fecal bacteria (read: poo) in Burnt Creek in Vancouver traced the pollution right back to the environmental regulators themselves.
Now there’s a little more on the story, courtesy of The Columbian . It appears a sewer connection from the offices shared by the Washington Dept. of Fish & Wildlife and the Dept. of Ecology was bungled 35 years ago. A search of local records indicates the sewage connection was botched in 1974, but officials don’t think sewage started to enter Burnt Creek until 1997.
