My boss and I pulled into a parking space outside our office. As she noted the mileage, my gaze drifted up, through the windshield and up into branches of the boxelder tree above. “Huh,” I said. “A hornet’s nest.”

She looked. “Oh, that’s a nice one. We should take it down and bring it into the office this fall once they’re done with it.” That’s the kind of place I work.

These are, of course, Bald-faced Hornets, Dolichovespula maculata. I used my telephoto lens to get pictures from the ground without bothering them – they can be aggressive if you disturb their nest. The papery structure is made from chewed-up wood, and is subdivided into cells inside like a beehive. They raise their young in it and then abandon it in the fall. Live and let live, I guess. We’ll let them do their thing and in a few weeks they’ll be gone.

Anadromous (adj): migrating up rivers from the sea to spawn.

Over the weekend I had the treat of visiting Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, where the annual run of Chinook salmon is currently approaching its peak. The dam is equipped with a fish ladder to provide passage around the dam for salmon and other anadromous fish migrating upstream to their spawning grounds.

The best part was the underground viewing windows, offering aquarium-like views of the wild fish as they passed by. Photos didn’t do the sight justice so I shot a quick video clip (and has my dad wave his hand around for scale).

At another window a whole school of Pacific Lampreys had suckered themselves onto the glass. Lampreys! So cool!

Not great photos (the light was bad) but still, OMG lampreys! Like salmon, these primitive fish spend part of their life cycle in the ocean but return to freshwater to reproduce before dying. Unlike salmon, they are parasites, using their crazy jawless sucker-mouths to latch onto other fish. Lampreys face a lot of threats and there are conservation efforts underway to help them out – more information here.

Like migratory birds, anadromous fish help stitch together different ecosystems in different places, connecting arid eastern Oregon where I live with the coast and the sea, and I really, really enjoyed getting to see them up close.

When I was in Portland last weekend, I got to pay a visit to Powell’s City of Books, a bookstore so big it takes up more than a city block and they hand you a map when you walk in the door. However, I displayed some restraint and managed to emerge with only two books to add to my sagging shelves. Both are about natural history, so I thought I’d share them here.

Must-See Birds of the Pacific Northwest, by Sarah Swanson and Max Smith. Having become somewhat acquainted with the authors through the magic of Twitter, I was eager to check this one out. I love the fun, idiosyncratic life histories of their eighty-five chosen “must-see” birds – my favorite is the Marbled Murrelet, which nests in huge mossy trees and catches fish in rough ocean waters and “if it drank microbrews and wore fleece, could be the region’s mascot.” They also include some suggested itineraries for weekend birding trips in Oregon and Washington, which are going to be highly helpful as I keep exploring my new state. The only downside (for me) is that the book focuses on the coastal third of both states, not the dry side where I live, which is why I also bought…

Oregon’s Dry Side: Exploring East of the Cascade Crest, by Alan D. St. John. I’m looking forward to reading more of this one as I have time. It includes chapters on the geology, flora, and fauna of the whole region, plus more detail on exploring specific areas within the dry side, with lots of color photos. This will be another one to pack along on weekend adventures.

What good books have you discovered lately?

Back in Wisconsin, aspen suckers grew like weeds after an area was logged. It came as a surprise to learn, when I moved out West, that here aspens are in serious decline and the focus of conservation efforts. Above is a stand that we’re going to be building a fence around soon at work, to protect it from damage from cattle, deer, and elk.

It’s doubtful that elk actually spend much time in this pasture anymore (though they’re definitely around in the hills), but the dark scars on the trunks of the trees come from elk scraping at the bark with their teeth to get at the nutritious, photosynthetic layer of bark under the white outer layer.

While aspen trees do produce flowers, most of their reproduction is vegetative, in the form of new shoots or “suckers” growing from existing root systems. Young, tender suckers are super tasty food for deer – the ones in the photo above, growing in the shelter of a fallen adult, have been heavily browsed. Fencing the deer out of the stand will help young trees get established.

The way suckering works is actually pretty interesting – the crown of the tree produces a hormone called auxin that inhibits the production of suckers. When the tree falls and auxin is no longer produced, the growth of new suckers increases in response to keep the stand going. An aspen stand is really one big organism, interconnected by the root system that keeps on living even as individual trees die and are replaced. One particular aspen clone in Utah is a candidate for the world’s largest, oldest organism.

There are multiple reasons for aspen decline in the West, including the removal of top predators from ecosystems (no wolves -> more elk and deer -> more browsing of aspen) and the suppression of natural wildfires, which allows other trees like junipers to become established and crowd out aspen. Climate change is almost certainly playing a role, as well. More information:

• Are Wolves Saving Yellowstone’s Aspen Trees from Elk?
• Aspen Ecology (including information on the role of fire)
• Sudden Aspen Decline, or SAD

One day last week a woman came into the office carrying a cardboard box and asking if there was a biologist around.

Last time something like this happened, the box contained a baby bat, but thankfully this time it was just a mysterious insect nest… thing… on a pine branch. I’m more or less the closest thing to a biologist in our office, so I took a look. I had no idea what it was, but I was pretty sure I could find out, and I used my phone to take a couple terrible photos.

Then, I turned to the number one tool of a naturalist in need of ID help: Twitter.

The lady who brought in the mystery object in my last 2 tweets thinks it's a "spider nest." Thoughts? @derekhennen @BioInFocus @AndyBugGuy

—
Rebecca Deatsman (@rdeatsman) September 05, 2013

@BioInFocus @rdeatsman @derekhennen Photo not real clear to my eyes, but is the exterior covered in frass?- that's kinda how it looks

—
Andy Warren (@AndyBugGuy) September 05, 2013

@AndyBugGuy @BioInFocus @derekhennen Now that you mention it, I think it was, yes. There's also silk-type stuff (thus "spider nest").

—
Rebecca Deatsman (@rdeatsman) September 05, 2013

@rdeatsman @BioInFocus @derekhennen Then likely a pyralid related to the Pine Webworm. Not sure which species off the top of my head...

—
Andy Warren (@AndyBugGuy) September 05, 2013

Yup, I took shameless advantage of my entomology contacts on Twitter – again – and in less than forty-five minutes I had an answer. This is a nest built by the caterpillars of a pine-munching moth, and that stuff it’s made of is frass, or caterpillar poop. The next day I ran into the woman who’d brought it in and told her, and she was very interested, if a little repulsed.

Social media: it’s not just for posting photos of what you had for lunch. It’s also for posting photos of balls of caterpillar poop.

It’s Sunday afternoon. You realize it’s been a week and a half since your last natural history blog post. You don’t feel like going on a long expedition. What do you do?

Luckily, I live somewhere where I can grab my camera and long lens, pick a direction, drive for ten minutes, and find a subject for a blog post on the side of the highway.

As is the case throughout most of North America, our most common roadside hawks here are Red-tails. This one, though, is something different. It’s not a species I see very often but I’m ninety-five percent sure this is a Ferruginous Hawk, specifically a light-morph juvenile. The pale unmarked underside and face and the feathered legs set it apart from the Red-tail, Swainson’s, and other buteos we might expect to see here. I was first introduced to this hawk, a classic grassland species, four years ago during the summer I spent on the Saskatchewan prairie.

After humoring me for a minute while I snapped photos through the passenger window of my car, it took off into the evening. This was a new one for my year list – I’m sure I’ve passed Ferruginous Hawks while driving around here before, but this was the first time I stopped and looked closely enough to make the ID.

Sometimes I’ll be typing a blog post or tweet and Google Chrome will give the red squiggle underline to something that I thought was a perfectly normal word. I double-check that I’m spelling it correctly, shrug, and click “Add to Dictionary.” Here is a sampling of the words that I’ve added to my browser’s “custom dictionary.”

Anadromous (migrating upstream to spawn, like a salmon)

Carotenoids (one of the pigments that creates the autumn colors of leaves)

Diecious (bearing male and female flowers on separate plants)

Ferruginous (rusty-colored, as in the Ferruginous Hawk)

Frass (caterpillar poop)

Halteres (the little vestigial knobs flies have where their second set of wings would be)

Herpetological (having to do with reptiles or amphibians)

Hibernacula (places where critters get together to hibernate; the singular is hibernaculum)

Lepidopterist (someone who studies butterflies and moths)

Parasitoid (a parasite that kills its host)

Pelage (an animal’s fur coat)

Predation (what a predator does)

Sedges (a group of grass-like plants)

Skink (a type of lizard)

Yeah, I don’t know why “skink” wasn’t already in there either, but there you have it. By the time this posts, I will be on my way to a canoe trip on the Willamette River (for work, not recreation). I’ll be back Friday, hopefully with new photos and stories!

I spent Wednesday through Friday of last week canoeing the Willamette River over on the coastal side of the state (for work – yes, be jealous). Marked on the map of one of the state parks we camped at, Willamette Mission, was the nation’s largest black cottonwood tree. Who could possibly resist?

It was…

…a very…

…big tree.

This is the “Willamette Mission Cottonwood,” which is 155 feet tall, has a circumference of over 26 feet, and is approximately 270 years old. For scale, here’s a poorly-lit shot with a couple people standing next to the trunk:

I wish I’d had more time to take better pictures and enjoy it properly, but alas, we were only passing by. Still, it’s always fun to encounter a giant.

More information:

• Willamette Mission State Park
• Oregon Heritage Trees
• Black Cottonwood (Wikipedia)

I wish I had photos to illustrate this post, but I don’t, it’s just something that’s been on my mind.

I’m not sure I’d ever laid eyes on a dark-phase Red-tailed Hawk before I moved to Eastern Oregon. Now I see them all the time. (At first, I’m embarrassed to admit, I think I mistook a few of them for Golden Eagles. Western raptors are still a new thing for me.) Click here for a photo of a typical Red-tailed Hawk, and here for a photo of the dark variety. Same species, two very different-looking birds.

A number of other Buteo raptors also have dark and light morphs – Swainson’s Hawks, Rough-legged Hawks, and Ferruginous Hawks are all found here and all include both dark and light birds. This variation is genetic (think of hair color in humans), and while dark birds are generally less common that light birds in every species, this varies by geography – you’re more likely to see a dark Red-tailed or Ferruginous Hawk out west, more likely to see a dark Rough-legged Hawk back east. What I want to know is, why? Is natural selection at work here, and if so, how are different color morphs adaptive for different regions?

One possible explanation that comes to mind is Gloger’s Rule, a zoological principle that states that within a species, darker animals will be found in more humid climates. My undergraduate ornithology professor studied how this applies to birds, and in fact he’s cited in the Wikipedia article linked to above. He found that, at least among Song Sparrows, there is more bacteria in birds’ feathers in humid climates than in dry ones, and having more pigment in the feathers makes them more resistant to bacterial damage. Unfortunately, I don’t think this applies to dark-morph hawks – otherwise why would dark Red-tails be more common here on Oregon’s “dry side” that in the comparatively rainy Midwest?

Of course, this could come down to random chance, some kind of founder effect where the start of a new population just happened to include more or less dark birds. But that’s boring, so I kept looking.

My next step was to do a quick literature search to see if I could find any other theories about color variation in hawks. (Someone else must have wondered about this at some point, right? Oh God I’m such a nerd.) Back in 1980 someone studied a population of Red-tailed Hawks in Arkansas that included both light and dark individuals, and they found that different-colored birds hunted in different habitats, selecting perch sites where they best blended in – light hawks hung out in open areas, while dark hawks preferred dense shade. Color variation let the species as a whole use more habitat types more efficiently.

I also found that this ties in with something called the image-avoidance hypothesis. If light-colored predators are what’s most common, that’s what prey animals will learn to avoid, and dark birds within a population might be more successful hunters as a result. Eventually the dark birds will become more common, prey animals will start paying more attention to them, and some sort of equilibrium will be reached.

This still doesn’t explain the geographical variation, as far as I understand it. Why are dark Red-tailed Hawks more common here in open rangeland than in shady Midwestern forests? It seems like it should be the opposite, and I’ve circled back around to a question that doesn’t really seem to have an answer.

Oh well. I had fun looking, and sometimes that’s the whole point.

References:

• Burtt & Ichida, 2004. Gloger’s rule, feather-degrading bacteria, and color variation among Song Sparrows. The Condor.
• Preston, 1980. Differential perch site selection by color morphs of the Red-tailed Hawk. The Auk.
• Rohwer & Paulson, 1987. The avoidance-image hypothesis and color polymorphism in Buteo hawks. Ornis Scandinavica.

If this were less in the middle of nowhere, it would be a pretty popular tourist spot.

Evan, you don’t mind me using the photo you took, right?

Having been to Arches National Park, when I hear “natural arch” I picture red rock desert, not volcanic basalt and pine trees. The idea is the same, though. This is Malheur National Forest’s Arch Rock, the trailhead for which is down a questionably-maintained gravel road and marked with a minimalist sign.

I’m not sure whether or not we were technically breaking the law by hiking on federal land during the government shutdown; there were no signs or barricades at the trailhead or on the road. National forests are so large, and used for so many different things, that it’s impossible to really close them. We passed a number of other people on our way in and out, including a couple cowboys on horseback rounding up a group of cattle.

It was a different story when we drove in the other direction out toward John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. Despite the fact that it’s a unit of the National Park Service, there are no gates or fees and the various overlooks and trailheads are located along a well-traveled state highway, so I thought they might still be accessible. However, each one had literal red tape stretched across the entrance to the parking area.

This thing is going to blow over pretty soon… right?

Over the weekend I took a drive up Highway 395 to take some photos of Camas Creek and the North Fork John Day River. Even here where most of the trees are pines, the scenery manages to look autumnal.

Time once again for one of my erratic collections of interesting nature and wildlife links – articles, photos, and more! Enjoy, and please share any interesting links of your own in the comments.

• In addition to being a writer, Vladimir Nabokov was a major butterfly enthusiast. Check out his beautiful drawings of made-up butterfly species for his wife and this lovely poem about describing a new butterfly species. “Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss, poems that take a thousand years to die, but ape the immortality of this red label on a little butterfly.”
• This comic about jumping spider mating dances is pretty much the best thing ever.
• Bad news for already-endangered Siberian Tigers – they’re experiencing a serious outbreak of canine distemper virus.
• Look closely at this infographic about the Monarch butterfly from the website of Orkin, the pest-control company. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
• Different species of pitcher plants have different strategies for capturing insects, and it depends on whether they live in wet or dry habitats.
• Apparently it’s a thing to photoshop arms onto birds. Because internet.
• Darwin’s kid drew adorable doodles on his manuscript of On The Origin of Species. Aww.
• I learned this week that snapping turtles are becoming established in Oregon (probably through people making unwise pet choices and then releasing them). An alligator snapper was recently found in a reservoir in a town a couple hours west of here.
• And finally, the morning that EPA employees got to back to work after the government shutdown, Joe Biden brought them muffins. Oh Joe Biden. Good ol’ crazy uncle Joe.

Next stop… the weekend!

Juncos! Who doesn’t love juncos? These fluffy little gray birds were one of the first species I learned to identify, always a winter fixture at our backyard birdfeeder when I was growing up in Ohio. But when I first cracked open a field guide, I was in for a bit of a surprise: juncos in other parts of the country looked very different from mine. In fact, what I know as the Dark-eyed Junco used to be considered about five different species before the “lumpers” got their hands on it. Back in the day, my plain-gray Ohio juncos would have been called Slate-colored (not Dark-eyed) Juncos to distinguish them from their various cousins around the country.

Which brings me to the birds that were in my backyard over the weekend.

Just like in Ohio, the arrival of juncos here is a sign that winter is approaching, but these aren’t “Slate-colored” Juncos, they’re (appropriately enough) “Oregon” Juncos. A common yard bird here, but a novelty to an easterner like me, and even though the lighting was bad I couldn’t resist taking a few terrible photos.

See? I warned you, terrible. But at least you can see that they have a dark gray head that contrasts with the reddish-brown back, unlike “Slate-colored” Dark-eyed Juncos, which are just solid gray on top.

Despite all the junco lumping, there is still a second official junco species in the U.S., but you have to travel to the mountains of southeastern Arizona to see it: the Yellow-eyed Junco (exactly what it sounds like, and on my 2013 year list, thanks to my spring break Arizona trip). It’s entirely possible that the Oregon subspecies of Dark-eyed Junco could be split off again in the future, giving me one more tick for my list. In the meantime, I’ll just keep enjoying my yard birds!

Hark, a blog post! (Man, remember when I used to post three times a week? Crazy.) Last spring I sat down and wrote an essay about a wildlife encounter I had on the Saskatchewan prairie the summer after I graduated from college. It was my first real dabble into “literary” writing in years, and after submitting it around and racking up a pile of rejection emails, I’ve admitted to myself that it’s not likely to get published for real. However, I hate to just leave it wasting away on my hard drive, so here it is. If you like owls and have time for a 1500-word essay of questionable literary merit… keep reading.

Owl Eyes
Rebecca Deatsman

In college, I learned exactly how and why an owl flies silently, with no wing beats disturbing the night. I sat in an ornithology lecture taking notes about how the ruffled edges to the owl’s flight feathers break up the turbulence of the air rushing over its wings, so that it can swoop down undetected on a mouse or vole. What I didn’t learn in that lecture was what it’s like to have an owl swoop low over your head and feel that total silence and how it seems more ghost than bird. I didn’t learn what it’s like to be the mouse.

*

It’s cold on the prairie before dawn, even in July.

I didn’t pack gloves with me when I came to Grasslands National Park for this job—who packs gloves for the middle of summer?—and my fingers freeze to the handlebars of my ATV as I zip toward the study site. It’s my first summer out of college, and I’ve taken my brand-new zoology degree to Saskatchewan, where I’ve been hired to collect data on how cattle grazing is affecting the plants and animals in the park. This morning I am counting birds, which means I have to be at my site by sunrise, when they start to sing. Sunrise is at five. Wildlife biology sounds like a glamorous career until you’re dragging yourself out of bed at 3:30 AM and grumbling about what a good accountant you would have made.

Still, it’s not all bad. Saskatchewan is not called the land of living skies for nothing, and I have a front-row seat to watch the dawn. Bands of clouds are starting to light up pink and gold at their edges. Beneath them low grass-covered hills roll toward the horizon, the dark shapes dotting them starting to resolve themselves into steer. I round a curve in the path and startle a group of pronghorn, which go bounding away from the ATV at what for them is a leisurely speed. There is not a tree in sight. To a girl who grew up with woods and cornfields, this landscape is alien, but it is beautiful too—without trees to soften its lines, it’s like looking out at the contours of a naked body, the body of someone I am only starting to know.

Eventually I pull to a stop, collect my backpack from the back of the ATV, and power up the GPS unit that will get me the rest of the way. With the roar of the ATV motor cut so abruptly the silence presses on my ears like a living thing. It’s about a kilometer in from the dirt track to the spot designated for my first bird count of the morning, and curious steer follow me at a distance as I walk, until I hop a wire fence and leave them behind. My footsteps crunch softly on the vegetation underfoot, the grasses dotted with wildflowers and with tiny cacti that blend in until you kneel on them painfully.

Finally I’m here, a patch of prairie no different from any other here except that it happens to be marked as a waypoint in the GPS. I pull out my clipboard and fill out the heading of my data sheet. The first narrow sliver of sun is just breaking over the horizon. I am the only human for miles in any direction.

*

For the owl, the “day” is coming to a close. All night it has been coursing back and forth low across the prairie, its buoyant moth-like flight carrying it over the grass as it watches and listens for small rodents. Breeding season is over and its young have already left the nest that was concealed on the ground among the vegetation. What does it think when it crests the ridge and sees a strange two-legged animal?

*

I never hear it. Getting my bearings, I simply turn around expecting to see empty prairie, and instead something is flying towards me—all feathers, eyes, and silence.
The bird is an owl with tiny ear tufts, buffy coloration, yellow eyes. I see them sometimes from the windows of the trailer where I live, distant shapes bobbing low over the prairie at dusk and on cloudy afternoons. But this one is far from distant, thirty feet away and coming fast.

I expect it to veer away. It doesn’t. It swoops toward me, passing only a few feet over my head, its unreadable yellow eyes meeting mine. It circles back and makes another pass before flying away in another direction. In moments it’s just a brown dot against the backdrop of the hills.

I never heard a sound. Not the faintest wing beat. Not even when it flew over so close I could have reached up and touched it.

My heart is pounding. I feel like something magical, something almost supernatural, has just happened—I feel like I’ve glimpsed another world, like it aroused some ancestral fear in me, from a time when primitive mousy mammal ancestors met their ends in the jaws of other yellow-eyed predators.

But the light is growing and the sparrows are starting to sing. I start the timer for my first point count, heft my binoculars, and get to work. Neat columns of data spin out across the clipboard, but my mind is still flying with the owl.

*

Anything I can tell you about the owl tells you just as much about me.

I can show off my knowledge of ornithology and tell you that it was a Short-eared Owl, Asio flammeus. Its presence in that particular field, with that particular grazing regimen, was one small data point for the study I was working on. It was not a new bird for my “life list,” the record birders keep of the species they see over their lifetime—I had seen Short-eared Owls back home in Ohio, though never so close. I can be less scientific, too, and tell you about what owls are supposed to symbolize—to many cultures, not an omen of wisdom, but one of death and bad luck.

“The eyes are the window to the soul,” says the cliché. If I told you I looked into the owl’s soul that morning I would be kidding myself. Whatever I thought I saw there, I was really looking into a mirror. We as a species impose our own meanings onto the rest of the world, but the name we give the owl is meaningless to the owl itself. We use names to categorize, to know that this bird is a Short-eared Owl and that one is something else, but even the idea of a species is something biologists made up for convenience. I remember once getting into a heady discussion of the meaning of objective truth, someone asking if you could point to a tree and say “that’s a white pine” and know that that was absolute objective truth, and all the biologists in the room (myself included) starting to hem and haw and talk about how often some tree species hybridize with each other. We need to be able to label things to be able to talk about them at all, but the real world is messier than the stories our neat categories tell.

Naming things helps connect us to them, too. When you move into a new house, part of getting to know your new home is learning your neighbors’ names, and applies to plants and animals as much as people. You can’t ask the owl to introduce itself, but when we take the trouble to learn their names we turn plants and animals from strangers into acquaintances. We can learn their history and their gossip and realize that what seemed like another anonymous cul-de-sac is actually brimming with drama. The difference is that the owl will never know or care what your name is. This relationship is entirely one-way.
I am probably not saying anything that others have not said before, and more eloquently. But more than anything else, maybe what the owl taught me is that each of us needs to come to this moment for ourselves, to look into the eyes of a predator and face the mirror.

A small piece of the owl took root inside my soul and grows and changes with every passing year, but the symbol-owl within to me has nothing to do with the life of the individual creature, overflowing with fierce life, whose existence brushed against mine in that cold prairie dawn.

*

Those knife-bright yellow eyes, the opaque barrier before the mind of the owl, have been the dying sight of many mice. For them, the owl really is an omen of death and disaster, just as many cultures believe it is. As I stood there transfixed by silent wings I felt a little of what the mouse feels. Knowing the physics of ruffled feathers is only half the story.

A month later I left the prairie. That was four years ago, and I have not been back. I could not have anticipated the turns my life has taken since then or the places they’ve led me to. Maybe the owl is still there, swooping low over the prairie at dawn while I wake up on a different part of the continent. More likely its children are. But I also took the owl with me, carrying the mirror of its yellow eyes with me wherever I go.

These photos have been sitting on my little point-and-shoot camera for a couple weeks now, waiting for me to finally bother to download and post them. I was pulling into the office after a day of field work when, as I parked the truck, I noticed that there was something very, very weird about one of the deer hanging out in the yard.

They aren’t great photos, but I wasn’t trying to be artistic, I was just trying to document this truly messed-up looking deer face.

He literally looks like he has an old bird’s nest stuck to his forehead. I went in and showed the photos to my boss, who at first thought it was some sort of deformation that had been caused by an old injury like getting hit by a car, but then she went outside for a better look and decided he’d somehow gotten caught on a chunk of old carpeting or something, although it must have been there a long time to cause his antler to grow in a funny direction.

Thoughts? Theories? He hasn’t come back, that I’ve seen.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Black-billed Magpie.

Photo by Alan D. Wilson, via Wikimedia Commons

Is that not a beautiful bird? I grew up in the magpie-free eastern third of the continent, and the first time I laid eyes on one was the summer I spent on the Saskatchewan prairie. The locals didn’t understand my fascination, but I mean, look at it. That long, streaming tail! (The only non-magpie bird regularly found in the U.S. with a tail so long relative to its body length is the Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, which I’ve never seen.) The handsome black-and-white plumage, with iridescent blue-green highlights!

Now, of course, I’ve moved to a corvid-rich part of the country where Black-billed Magpies are just one of the cool members of the jay family flying around (I also see Common Ravens, Stellar’s Jays, Gray Jays, and Clark’s Nutcrackers all pretty regularly). No matter how many magpies I see, I never get tired of them. They’re so handsome. A fellow immigrant to the area told me he used to think they were cool until he found out they’re “just scavengers.” Just scavengers?! Yes, like most corvids they’re not above eating roadkill, but the best looks I’ve gotten at eagles (both Bald and Golden) have also been at roadkill! There’s no such thing as “just” a scavenger. Hmph.

Photo by ZeWrestler, via Wikimedia Commons

I wonder if people who grow up out here and move to the eastern part of the country are as fascinated by Blue Jays as I am by all their beautiful western cousins. Magnificent marvelous magpies with their streaming tails.

Here, once again, is my monthly-ish collection of wildlife and conservation links and articles that have caught my eye – plenty of fun facts and interesting eye candy for your Sunday afternoon reading.

• As someone who has often experienced being the only twenty-something woman in a group of birders, this list of 11 rules for the twenty-something birdwatcher made me laugh. It is completely accurate.
• The Dragonfly Whisperer imagines what it would be like if Sherlock Holmes were a birder (or dragonfly-er).
• I love the series of “wide-angle close ups” of plants that Ohio nature photographer Tom Arbour has been posting on his blog, putting native plants in the context of their habitats – my favorite so far is the large white trillium but they’re all worth checking out.
• Indigo Snakes are a super cool (and increasingly threatened) species of snake found in the southeastern U.S. An unexpected sighting of one in southwest Georgia hints at the possibility of a previously unknown population.
• Even Buzzfeed is getting excited about birds, with these 9 reasons the loon is the best bird. Agree? Disagree?
• If you want to know whether or not your polar bear is pregnant, consult Elvis the beagle.
• A version of the U.S. map with state borders redrawn according to watersheds.
• A photographer in Wisconsin spent a year documenting the life of an otherwise ordinary oak tree. The results are beautiful.
• Finally, this past Monday science-y folks on Twitter hijacked Seventeen‘s #ManicureMonday hashtag with photos of their own hands (some manicured, some not) doing science stuff. I posted an old picture in which I’d used my hand (with purple nail polish) for size reference in a photo of coyote scat. Slate linked to my tweet in their write up. I guess I’m famous now?

As always, feel free to share your own finds in the comments!

On the blog, I mean.

In grad school, I was very busy but I had a flexible schedule that meant I often worked in the evenings and had plenty of free time during the day to wander around outside and go on adventures and take pictures. I also had easy access to beautiful natural surroundings, with miles and miles of hiking trails through the woods literally right outside my door. I was spoiled rotten.

Now I have a grown up job and I’m working a regular grown-up person’s 8-to-5 schedule. And counterintuitively, despite the fact that I live in the middle of nowhere, it’s about an hour’s drive each way to get from where I live to get to any good hiking. (The land close by is mostly private ranches, and even in the National Forest there aren’t a whole lot of developed trails outside a few popular areas.) There have also been some changes in my personal life that mean that, if I only have time and energy for one expedition with a long drive over the weekend, going hiking by myself probably isn’t going to be it.

All of this isn’t to say I’m unhappy, just that there’s a reason why I haven’t been writing blog posts three times a week (or even once a week) lately. I still care about this stuff, and I’m still going to continue blogging as I have time and material, but it’s probably going to continue to be slow for a while. In the meantime, you can always follow me on Twitter, where I post photos, links, and short updates pretty regularly.

Anyway, it’s December now, so just like I’ve done for the past couple years I’m going to go ahead and write up a recap of my year in nature for you (because that’s not narcissistic of me at all, amiright?).

• In January I got to hobnob with a famous porcupine. It was a big moment for me, okay.
• In February I traveled to the winter birding mecca Sax-Zim Bog and added not one, not two, but three owl species to my life list.
• In March I spotted my first naked-eye comet since I was a kid. (Rest in peace, ISON.)
• In April I checked another item off my birding bucket list when I observed a Greater Prairie Chicken lek. Woo-hoo! This spring maybe Sage Grouse?
• In May I got some great up-close looks at a Killdeer nest.
• Then came June. I drove across the country from Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin to Long Creek, Oregon with all of my earthly possessions crammed into my Honda Civic. Through the looking glass, indeed.
• In July I joined the twenty-first century and bought my first smart phone, allowing me to post my nature pics right from the field.
• In August I discovered that some species of butterfly are considered pest insects. Who knew?
• In September I got to see a real, wild salmon run through the viewing windows in the Bonneville Dam’s fish ladder, and it was AMAZING. Also: lampreys!
• In October I rebelled against the federal government shutdown by hiking on National Forest land at a time when it may technically have been illegal. I’m still not sure.
• In November I… only wrote four blog posts, and one of them was just a linkspam. Still not sure what’s going on with this deer’s face.
• And now it’s December. If you had told me a year ago what my life was going to be like now – professionally, personally, everything – I would have been dumbfounded. Here’s to more adventures in 2014!

Gasp! A blog post! Okay, yeah, this has been the longest dry stretch since I started this blog four (!!!) years ago, but I’m resurfacing long enough to share with you a piece of writing that’s been sitting on my hard drive for a while now. This is a story from the three months I spent in Australia back in 2009, which I’ve posted about previously (specifically regarding echidnas and a giant dust storm). I fiddled around a bit with the idea of submitting this piece to a literary magazine or several, but ultimately decided to just post it here. It’s around 1200 words; let me know what you think.

Storm in the Outback
Rebecca Deatsman

I ended up in the Australian Outback mostly for lack of anything better to do.

The autumn after I graduated from college, I was working for an Italian PhD student studying bird behavior in western New South Wales in exchange for travel expenses and a place to stay. This wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it sounds; we weren’t studying emus or kookaburras, but Chestnut-crowned Babblers, small, chattering, boisterous brown birds recognized by their bold white eyebrows. My primary job was to wear a GPS tracker while following around a flock that seemed to delight in endlessly darting up and down the sides of steep, rocky ridges while I huffed and puffed after them. The PhD student, contrary to affable Italian stereotypes, turned out to be taciturn, unsmiling, and difficult to please. Still, it felt like an adventure, which was exactly what I was looking for.

The birds roosted at night in large, communal nests woven through the branches of the scrubby mulga trees that dotted the lanscape, and we sat in camouflaged blinds to videotape them as they returned to the nests each evening. Late one afternoon the PhD student dropped me off at one nest tree with my tripod, camera, and collapsible blind. The plan was that he would drop the second field assistant at another site further down the red dirt track, then set up himself at a third nest, finally coming back up the track to collect us after the birds had all roosted for the night. Though he ended up a couple kilometers away, I could see the truck from my assigned spot, parked on top of a ridge.

As I popped up my camouflaged hiding place, I heard a quiet growl of thunder somewhere in the distance, but I ignored it, figuring it would blow over or pass by; I desperately didn’t want the glowering PhD student to think I was a wimp scared of a little thunder. I even paused to snap a photo of the clouds, which were turning orange as twilight approached. In the air above me swarmed a flock of hundreds of woodswallows, more than I’d ever seen at once before, their nasal calls making a tremendous racket.

The thunder sounded again, closer this time, and the wind started to pick up.
I was debating whether I should head in after all when the PhD student radioed to tell me to do just that. Calmly, I packed up the equipment and slung the straps over my shoulders before I started walking toward the relative safety of the truck, which looked deceptively close parked on the crest of that ridge. Even though it wasn’t dark yet, I put on my head lamp and flicked it on, just in case. An approaching storm wasn’t cause for panic—not yet. It was just prudent to get to shelter rather than take any unnecessary risks.

It was another voice crackling over the radio, one of the other researchers back at the station, that made us realize maybe this wasn’t an ordinary thunderstorm. “Babbler people, get the fuck back to the house NOW! Man, you have to give up for tonight, there’s a hundred-kilometer-per-hour storm heading straight for you that’s going to flood all the creek beds for sure!” I began to jog, and then to run, the camera case and folded-up blind bouncing on my shoulders.

I don’t know how long my race with the storm lasted. Certainly no more than five minutes. As the twisted mulga trees began to sway back and forth with increasing energy, branches hissing as they rubbed together, I continued hurrying toward the truck. Sometimes it was in sight, sometimes hidden behind the ridges that separated me from it. The other field assistant was frantically radioing the PhD student as she struggled to fold up her own blind. I could taste the red dust as I hopped through endless the jumbles of rocks, my throat raw from exertion as I scrambled up the hills at top speed. When the full fury of the storm finally hit, I was no more than fifty feet away.

The force of the wind struck me like a physical collision. I was downwind of the truck and made it a few more steps before I had to throw myself to the ground to avoid being blown back down the hill I had just climbed. The wind was full of grit and hailstones that pummeled my arms and shoulders so hard I thought my bones would break, roaring like a living beast.

I was terrified, in a way that I had never experienced before. Looking back, I’m not sure I was really in as much danger as I felt like I was, but in the moment I genuinely thought I might be about to die. I remember screaming a long, wordless scream, the only time in my life that I have truly screamed in fear.

Then suddenly the PhD student, who was bigger and heavier than me, was half-dragging me the rest of the way to the truck, where the other field assistant was already waiting, having finally abandoned her gear to get to safety. Shaking, I reached up and switched off my head lamp as I huddled in the back seat. (The other field assistant told me later they had been able to see me coming the whole way, thanks to the light of that head lamp, bobbing up and down as I jogged across the Outback terrain.) One of the windows in the truck was blown out and the PhD student’s hat and glasses were gone but somehow I was still clutching my camera and blind.

The three of us waited for the storm to pass—it blew on as abruptly as it had hit—and then for the water in the normally dry creek beds to go down enough for us to drive through them and back to the field station. I hadn’t even noticed that there had been rain as well as hail. By the time we got back, night had fallen and the thin delicate crescent moon was setting in a perfectly clear sky.

The last month of my season in Australia passed without further excitement, aside from the lasting bruises on my arms and shoulders from the pounding hail. I went home and moved on to the next thing and haven’t kept in touch with the taciturn Italian PhD student, the other field assistant, or any of the other people I met at the research station; those three months of my life have been reduced to a few lines near the end of my resume, a handful of photos of red ridges and kangaroos, and a vivid memory of fear.

There are so many stories about “mother” nature, inspiring and welcoming and wonderful. However, nature is not a warm and loving mother who cares about you. Nature is a force that can’t be reasoned with, can’t be fought, and it can be absolutely terrifying. I went looking for an adventure in Australia, and this is what Australia taught me. The lesson has stayed with me long after the bruises from that afternoon faded, and if I ever start to forget, I only need to close my eyes to bring back the power of the wind on that rocky hillside.
You can’t fight a storm. You can only get out of the way.

Peering out of a blind at a babbler nest.

My bruises the day after the storm.

Photo by Zinneke, via Wikimedia Commons

I have a confession to make: I’m not really a geology person. I understand objectively why some people would consider it fascinating, and I sometimes wish I was one of those people, but whenever I actually try to read a book or watch a presentation about rocks and geologic history my mind starts to wander almost immediately.

Still, occasionally a particular geology concept will lodge itself in my brain anyway, and when that happens I feel very proud of myself for being able to point out some odd rock feature and give it a name. Case in point: columnar basalt. Whenever I’m driving around here and see these odd hexagonal columns of stone, I always think to myself “hey, columnar basalt!” and feel happy.

Basically, these structures form when lava cools relatively rapidly and contracts as a result. From Wikipedia: “While a flow can shrink in the vertical dimension without fracturing, it can’t easily accommodate shrinking in the horizontal direction unless cracks form; the extensive fracture network that develops results in the formation of columns… The size of the columns depends loosely on the rate of cooling; very rapid cooling may result in very small (<1 cm diameter) columns, while slow cooling is more likely to produce large columns.” The fact that these formations are so common around here attests to the area’s volcanic past.

So, to sum up, my entire understanding of the geologic history of eastern Oregon boils down to “volcanoes, woot!” and I’m pretty okay with that. But I really like columnar basalt. Because I know what it is.