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 Once upon a time, just a couple of weeks ago, we had three beautiful cats. Two of them, Oreo and Cody, we had for over ten years. The other was a stray we found on the side of the road a couple of years ago that we named Maxine. Then one morning I left the house to go to work and was confronted by a coyote trotting down the road right in front of my house. The animal paused at the end of my driveway and stared at me with a “waddya you lookin’ at?” expression. I threw a stone at the coyote and together with my dog we chased it away. A day or two after that I spotted another coyote just down the road from my home. Within a week all three of our beautiful cats were gone.
Were the coyotes to blame in the first place? After speaking with neighbors and doing a little research I have to say yes. My first reaction was, naturally, outrage. My wife and I adored those cats. They added color, liveliness, and personality to our home; they were affectionate pets who truly loved our company as well. For the first time in my life I was deeply angry at a wild animal (except for the time a zoo chimp spit on me), and I understood the anger ranchers and farmers harbor about wolves, coyotes, and other predators.
Continue reading COYOTES – LOVE ‘EM OR HATE ‘EM?
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 You’re walking along the rocky Northwest ocean shore line and you see then by the billions and gazillions. Barnacles, barnacles, and more barnacles. The cling to every rock, pylon, piece of drift wood, shell, and just about anything else touched by the sea. These non-descript bits of life and their protective shells seem to encrust everything. But what they are and how they do it is a reveals just how fascinating and complex the simplest organism can be.
Continue reading Know Your Barnacles
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 You’d think an amphibian exceeding eight inches in length, common enough to be found from California to Alaska, and hardy enough to live in elevations from sea level to eight or ten thousand feet would be a familiar sight. But this is definitely not the case with the Northwestern Brown Salamander. Not that salamanders are the easiest creatures in the world to find in the first place. Any animal that likes dark damp places is one that normally escapes notice until the intrepid collector goes deliberately looking. But the Northwestern Brown belongs to an especially secretive family of salamanders called the Ambystomatidae – the Mole Salamanders. As the name obviously implies they live like moles, spending the majority of their lives underground coming up into world of light only to breed and even then only during certain times of the year. Even that is not a reliable indicator since breeding behavior is dependent on weather conditions still not clearly understood.
Continue reading The Northwestern Brown Salamander
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