Sturgeon

Word Count 877

                                                

I grew up in Oregon, wandered about the country for thirty years, and then came back for the last twenty-five.  There is much to complain about here – the politics and many of the people for two, but there is much good about the natural Oregon.  The various climates in Oregon, from wet mild western to dry extreme eastern yield a variety of environments.

I’m not an expert on much of this, but I can still enjoy what I see and hear on my recreation hiking, volunteering as a park steward, or even just looking from my house.

California is known for redwoods, but they make it across the southern border into Oregon.  We have mighty cedars, firs, and pines over Western Oregon which are only slightly less majestic.  We have large cedars, firs, and pines in or our own yard.  Many deciduous trees live here.  We have a giant ash tree beside the road.  Conservation efforts are working on a comeback for oak trees.  Eastern Oregon has a problem with invasive juniper trees sucking up the sparse water.

I saw a branch shared by two different trees in Tryon Creek State Park where I volunteer.  It was hard to believe, but it appears to be a rare natural phenomenon of roots of one tree putting up two trunks.  Nurse trees are much more common.  A tree will grow out of a rotten tree, or a tree will grow from the top of a snag sending roots down the snag fifteen feet on a tree that we saw.

The rocky Oregon coast has fine viewing for tidal pools filled with barnacles, sea stars, sea anemones, and crabs.  Sometimes the shore is littered with crab shells or blue sail jellyfish washed ashore.  Whales migrate in season close to the shore.

The Columbia River was known for salmon, and the Willamette for lamprey both of which fed the pre-Europeans.  The population has diminished because of dams and overfishing.  As a child my father and I fished for sturgeon, which is an ancient fish, below the Bonneville dam.  The record sturgeon, caught in the Columbia, was 12.5 feet long and 1,285 pounds.  I was fascinated to watch the twitching of the fillets of sturgeon.  The nervous system was still operating on parts of dead fish.  A small pond with eight hundred pound Herman the Sturgeon is a popular attraction at the Bonneville fish hatchery.

Lampreys have been caught over hundreds of years at the Willamette Falls as a food source for the local inhabitants.  They are much different from sturgeon, but they are another ancient fish with a large sucker for a mouth.  They go from egg to larva, which live in the river bottom for years, go to sea, become parasites on other fish, then eventually return to spawn and die.  Ugly to us, but very nutritious.

The amphibians are a little higher on the family tree than fish, but less numerous.  We sometimes see frogs or water puppies in ponds, but native frogs and other amphibians are suffering.  I’ve found a couple of dead pacific giant salamanders and many live ensatina newts.

A variety of snakes live here, and one is venomous.  We’ve seen rattlesnakes on a few of our adventures.  I was struck at once.  Ha – missed me.  When I was very young with my parents hunting in southeast Oregon, I saw horned toads.  Yosemite Sam gave the lizards some notoriety with his exclamation “Great horny toads”.  Lizards are more common in eastern Oregon because of the weather.

I’m not a regular bird watcher but there is plenty to see.  I’ve been intimidated by a raven on the hood of my car.  We see owls sometimes.  Perhaps some people’s heads look like rodents, because they have been known to dive at people.  Woodpeckers and their pecking on wood and gutters are common.  My favorite bird scene was two impressive pileated woodpeckers doing Woody Woodpecker impressions on snags ten feet apart.  The rotten wood was flying.  Second place – a hummingbird attracted to my flowery hat treading air three inches from my face.

Oregon has the usual western native mammals – deer (one wondered across the street from our house), elk, cougar, wolves (reintroduced), and coyotes which have also been close to our house.  Questionable reports of cougar in the neighborhood have never been confirmed.  The only known fatal cougar attack in Oregon happened 2018 in the north central part of the state.  We were banned from hiking in the area until the cougar was killed.

I researched antelope of eastern and southern Oregon and found out that they are not antelope – at least in the sense the term is used in the rest of the world.  They are more accurately known as pronghorns or American antelope and related to giraffes.  Pronghorn fact – it is the fastest land mammal in North America, faster than necessary because they evolved with such fast, but extinct, predators such as dire wolves.  In the 1950s I was with my parents hunting them, and much later with my editor I was watching them in the south central Hart Mountain Refuge where they are common.

Industrialization and human overpopulation may be the end of nature as we know it, followed by our extinction.

Meant for a publication that didn’t take it. Because I couldn’t think of an appropriate placement, it’s here.