Today I had the truly great joy of encountering Spotted Owls in the wild!

The Northern Spotted Owl is currently listed as threatened in the United States under the Endangered Species Act. According to Fred Swanson, the Andrews Forest was formerly home to perhaps 7 or 8 mating pairs of Spotted Owls, but their numbers are dwindling, despite substantial efforts to conserve their old growth nesting habitat. Currently, there may be 3 or 4 mating pairs within Andrews. As if their difficulties with forest demise weren’t bad enough (old growth replaced by younger forests managed for timber), their territory is now being invaded by an increasing population of Barred Owls. The Barred are larger, more reproductively successful, and more omnivorous. The Spotted Owl eats only a few things; the Barred Owl eats many things.

If you’d like to hear the sound of the Spotted Owl, here is a site that includes a sound file of their call (both hooting and whistling). The recording has it backwards, perhaps:  I heard them doing their ‘location whistling’ for quite a while before there was any ‘hooting.’

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Spotted_Owl/id

There is also a discussion of ethics and the “Spotted Owl controversy” on Santa Clara University’s website, for those who are foggy on some of the details, history, and implications:

http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v4n1/homepage.html

I went out this morning with the “owl crew” — researchers who are gathering data on the Northern Spotted Owl in Andrews and the surrounding Willamette National Forest.  After a rutted drive, we hiked a short distance up-slope into rugged old growth terrain to a known site, where we met both a female and male, hanging out near their nest.  Amazing experience!

Delightful owls!! They seem small in my photos, perhaps, but only because they are in such large trees.

The researchers follow a protocol that includes offering a few live mice to owls (this helps bring them in closer for band checks).  Once they have prey in hand, they often reveal the location of the nesting tree. The female owl knew this drill (actually she even knew the sound of the tupperware mouse container opening,  I think).  She was not shy, and hooked her mice in record time. Her partner, however, was reluctant to approach us. The researchers were excited to meet him (“the boyfriend”) and said that it was probably only his second encounter with people. His first encounter was being man-handled during banding, so the boyfriend remained carefully aloof.

An owl researcher just deposited this fresh mouse on the great fallen tree beside my camera. The log was very large — maybe chest-high — and the mouse just sat there for a moment, getting its bearings. Seconds later the owl arrived. One minute the mouse was sitting on the log, wondering which way to go, and the next minute the spotted owl had grabbed it and was back up on the branch. The owl DROPPED silently on the mouse, just a foot in front of me, in one great outspreading of wings, then the snatch, and then a soft ‘whooh, whooh’ wing-sound as she flew back to her perch.

If you look closely you will see the mouse is now in the female’s beak. The spotted owl is wondering whether to “cache” her fresh-caught mouse, eat it, or bring it high up into an adjacent old-growth Douglas fir, where her nest is located. In the end, I believe the decision was made to tuck this juicy mouse away in a hole in the tree, and save it for later….

Later, the male owl DID bring a mouse up to the nest, which required a number of “ladder” steps, flying counter-clockwise in trees surrounding the nest tree, getting a bit higher with each perch. The nest is located at the very top, in the rotted top-notch of a massive Douglas fir; the crown is thick with new tops that have been sent up, and the nest is probably sheltered at the center, hidden between them.

My heart was singing owl-songs all the way down the mountain.  Best of all:  as I was driving, an owl swooped over the road in dense, mossy trees, just ahead of me!  I stopped the truck, turned off the engine, and tried out my new-found owl vocabulary, hooting hopefully (and badly) into the trees, wondering if it was the watchful boyfriend bird, but nothing answered.

My plan for the day was to stay focused on writing, but it was so beautiful I couldn’t stay indoors. Compromising, I dragged my papers and books outside to a picnic table.

Today I spent about six hours up at this site in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest: the Blue River Face, located high up on a forest road, about 4 miles from the headquarters.

This high south-facing slope was partially logged (in multiple parts, using a variety of experimental techniques and harvesting percentages) and then intentionally burned (again, in multiple zones, simulating different fire conditions). Now, the site is being studied for long-term tree mortality, bio-diversity, regrowth rates, etc.

While I was out up at Blue River Face, a group of several vans full of college students (forestry, I assume?) from Quebec pulled up, led by the Andrews site manager Mark, and Thomas Spies, a USFS Research Forest Ecologist, who gave them an outdoor lecture on the history of the Blue River Face experimental harvest, and the “simulated natural fire” techniques that followed.

Note: I had to carry a radio today, just in case I ran into problems like a downed tree or a stubborn gate or truck problems or some other calamity. I’ve been told there are mountain lions here, too, but I really don’t think I’d have time to call for back-up by radio if a mountain lion decided to revise my travel plan. As Tim Fox told me yesterday: “I think they’re there watching us… they stalk us all the time.” His sense is that they simply don’t attack in most cases unless they sense illness, weariness, limping, etc. So: note to self! Stand up straight! Walk strong! No foot-soreness here, mister mountain lion, just move along…. I’m not limping, I’m just dragging this heavy bag full of inedible notebooks….

After a long (unpredictable! windy! beautiful!) road trip from Upper Michigan, I arrived at the Andrews Experimental Forest in the Willamette National Forest late Friday afternoon —- just in time to check in, and catch part of a talk by researcher Fred Swanson, who was addressing an inaugural gathering of geomorphologists, who are calling themselves the Bretz Club, in honor of J. Harlen Bretz.

Fred Swanson gave me a whirlwind tour of the Andrews admin building, and we walked out to a “gravel bar” site in Lookout Creek, where geologist Gordon Grant was speaking to the assembled geomorphologists. From there, we drove out into the forest a bit, so he could show me a log decomposition study site, one of the “Reflection Sites” that the writers are asked to respond to.  Since I’m new to this pacific-northwest-cool-wet-old-growth-rainforest environment, every detail of the forest scene is new, and staggering. I’m sure I’m missing 90% of it, looking everywhere at once, unfocused.

Evidence of experiments (flagged markers, white plastic buckets and funnels) are scattered like a bit of seaside flotsam, hardly noticeable amid the grand old trees.  A few plastic buckets jut out of downed logs in various stages of decomposition, everything lichenous and moss-cushioned from ground to canopy.

I was given a topo map of Andrews, and marked directions to several other study sites including a clear-cut plot and the “Blue River face timber sale” (which is another reflection site).  My plan for today (Sunday) will be to explore the Andrews further.

Yesterday (Saturday) was my “establishing context” day:  a crash course in the surrounding GEOMORPHOLOGY.

After a serene night sleeping under great trees, with the sound of Lookout Creek sluicing over rocks below, I joined the Bretz Club gathering on their all-day Field Trip to see various hydrological, geological and vulcanological sites in the surrounding McKenzie River system, just above/outside the Andrews system.   We hiked in to a secretive “lost” spring  (large, cold, pristine) nicknamed “hobbit-land” and then up to the Collier Cone lava flow, hiking onto it and beyond, to see dry stream channels (complete with stream-rounded cobbles amid the broken landscape of the larger flow) and the absolutely stellar “Proxy Falls” — a waterfall which cascades down from a high ridge drainage area, forms a large clear pool, and disappears!  It is like an inverted spring, flowing down *into* the ground, where it escapes under the lava flow.

During our hike we frequently stopped to hear the fluvial geology comments of Gorden Grant, as well as current research findings (with lots of fascinating and as-yet-unanswered questions!) about the lava flows by researchers Natalia Deligne and Sarah Lewis and comments from world-renowned vulcanologist and professor Kathy Cashman. Often the group hiked with (or started by consulting) large LIDAR images, which are revolutionizing landscape research/scientific mapping, or we passed around small xeroxed copies showing the locations of numerous lava flows of various ages.  Some flows are hidden by moss and old growth forest, while other flows are young and easily visible, lying black and broken atop the terrain…  new research is showing, among other things, there are far more flows of distinct ages/events than previously understood.

We stopped at Olallie Creek (high Cascades spring-fed stream) for lunch, then on to see the Carmen Reservoir (and dry channel) of the upper McKenzie River, much of which is siphoned off through a surreal tunnel in the mountain, bypassing the water to an entirely different canyon, allowing Oregon Power to harvest hydrological power from the river, before it rejoins the original McKenzie downstream.

We hiked along the upper McKenzie as it roars in full whitewater form over logs and through rock gorges and over several drop-dead waterfalls, where the geologists debated erosion theories while the poet sketched and eavesdropped.  As a sign at the NFS trailhead put it:  “Centuries of visitors have stood in awe of this place.  You can almost see their spirits lingering still.”

Finally, we visited Clear Lake where we commandeered a fleet of rental row boats and observed downed (and still-standing) trees along the bottom of the lake.  The water is tropically blue-cerulean, ice-cold, and crystal clear.  The lake bottom is marbled white with diatomaceous material, reminding me of snorkeling over the white coral reef floor along Cozumel (minus the tropical-fruit colored fish).  We put ashore on the far side, and hiked around to see the “Great Spring” which is the source, or headwater, of the McKenzie.  Crystalline, teal-sky-blue, the water pours forth with such force that we could not row into the spring’s inlet, which enters the adjacent lake like a whitewater stream.  The Great Spring is surrounded with huge trees (including a great Douglas Fir that has fallen down into it on one side, and older bleached trunks visble, deeper down). As with the other hydrological sites we visited, there was a great rubbly lava flow just uphill from the Great Spring.

Repeatedly, the inter-connection was made between the lava flows and the activity of groundwater, and the interplay between river-courses and obstacles such as the lava flows.  It was fascinating to hear researchers discussing the underlying seismic activity of the area, including past eruptions and inevitable future volcanic events.  How do we plan for catastrophes?  How will these groundwater systems be affected by large change (volcanic) or subtle changes (climate shifts could affect groundwater volumes, seasonal precipitation, etc.)  The McKenzie provides a key drinking water source for cities like Portland Eugene… begging such questions as how will flooding or ashfalls or earthquakes continue to change this critical high Cascades landscape of complex systems?  And how to respond, poetically…

“Ideas without precedent are generally looked upon with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged.”

- J. Harlen Bretz, 1928

In dark news, our friend Cynthia was arrested this week for “trespassing” (!?) in a public forest parcel on the Yellow Dog Plains, at the sacred Eagle Rock site.  (This is where the global mining conglomerate Kennecott wants to start a controversial sulfide mine — where they want to blast a hole into the sacred Eagle Rock itself, and tunnel underneath the pristine Salmon Trout River).   Note that Cynthia was on Public Lands — yet arrested for “trespassing.”  An insult on so many levels — civil, ecological, judicial and spiritual.  I’ve been incredibly honored to know Cynthia over the past eleven years, and I am fiercely proud of her for resisting Kennecott’s bullying.  All citizens, regardless of their personal feelings about sulfide mining, must recognize that their public access to “public lands” is at risk!  Confronted with a bulldozer, security guards, and police, most people would apologize and leave the site — even if they believed they’d done nothing wrong.  It takes a very strong person to draw a line in the sand, follow their heart, and resist.

Here is a portion of the news article by Gabriel Caplett.  Please visit the Headwaters news site to read the full story (and check for updates):

….. arrested today for “trespassing” on public land in the Escanaba River State Forest, in northern Marquette County.  Cynthia Pryor planned on visiting Eagle Rock, site of Kennecott Minerals’ proposed “Eagle” mine, to keep an eye on the company’s activities.  She was arrested while sitting on an old tree stump with her dog, Sophie.

She arrived to find Kennecott removing trees and widening a short road leading from the Triple A road to Eagle Rock, where the company plans to blast a portal for the mine. Pryor was confronted by Kennecott security guards who informed her that she was “trespassing” on land leased by the company from the State of Michigan.  Reportedly, Pryor responded that she believed she was not trespassing, as she was on public land and Kennecott lacked a permit to begin construction activities at the site.  Company security made some calls to area law enforcement, reporting Pryor’s presence at the small tract of public forest.

Both state and county law enforcement responded and informed Pryor that she was trespassing and told her to leave.  Pryor refused, reiterating that she was not trespassing, as the site is on public land.

Pryor has been visited in jail by legal counsel.  The Reverend Jon Magnuson, a close friend, attempted to speak with her this evening.  According to Magnuson, while he wasn’t allowed to visit with Pryor, he was able to pass prayers along to her.

“Civil disobedience has a long and noble tradition in American democracy and part of the religious responsibility is to honor and respect that,” said Magnuson.

Many thanks to Jon Magnuson for relaying all our prayers.  The whole situation has me thinking of a poem by Robert Bly, Call and Answer.

Here are the first few lines:

Tell me why it is we don’t lift our voices these days
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?

I say to myself: “Go on, cry. What’s the sense
Of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!”

Read the entire poem (and see a short video of the poet reading his poem) here:  http://www.greatmotherconference.com/poems/Call_and_Answer_Robert_Bly.html

I feel compelled to mention a strange CBC interview I heard today, with Paola Antonelli, The Museum of Modern Art’s Senior Curator of Architecture and Design. The gist of the story is MoMA’s announcement that it “has acquired the @ symbol into its collection.” Seriously.

Many are dismissing this as a MoMA publicity stunt of dada-esque proportions, in which case I am playing into their hands by wondering aloud how any institution (even if it is a beloved art museum) can say they’ve “acquired” an element of typography with centuries of documented development, ubiquitous contemporary meaning, and global usage. There is no one to acquire @ from (or Everyone – did everyone give them permission?), and no price to negotiate, so it is a terrific bargain for MoMA.  They may decide to quit acquiring real art altogether, since it is so darn expensive, and focus on the rest of the keyboard.

My first thought, as I have been considering the demise of the hyphen, was that perhaps I should announce that I’ve “acquired” the hyphen!  I’ll just rewrite their press release slightly…  On second thought, perhaps I should acquire the question mark while I’m at it — ?????? –  since this issue raises so many of them.

After much head-scratching, I decided to look for MoMA’s announcement in print, and found this MoMA blog post by Ms. Antonelli. As in the CBC interview, Antonelli’s post briefly (and articulately) summarizes the history of that typographic mark we now refer to as @, or the “AT sign.” I am certainly fascinated by the history of “@” and would love to learn more about it.  Luckily, expect there will be a lovely @ coffee table book published soon. Or perhaps now it is the “@ symbol recently acquired by MoMA” (or will MoMA change it’s name to MoM@)?

Antonelli’s post contains several statements that I would like to quote here. First, after acknowledging that the symbol could not really be purchased, she states “We have acquired the design act in itself…” Wow! So not just the @ symbol, but the whole creative process, the “@ct of Design, brought to you by MoMA.” Statements like this really make me question their institutional hubris.  Antonelli also state “The @ symbol is now part of the very fabric of life all over the world.” I would say YES — and this is the very reason that any single institution cannot claim to “acquire” it. I am left to wonder whether the Catholic church will now announce that they’ve “acquired” the cross symbol. Wouldn’t their press releases say the very same thing? “The cross symbol is now part of the very fabric of life all over the world.”

The acquisition of @ takes one more step. It relies on the assumption that physical possession of an object as a requirement for an acquisition is no longer necessary, and therefore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknowledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (buildings, Boeing 747’s, satellites), or because they are in the air and belong to everybody and to no one, like the @—as art objects befitting MoMA’s collection.

I am left remembering when Monsanto, back in 2005, announced they’d patented their newest genetic invention, the PIG.

MoMA | @ at MoMA.

Comparing two aerial images from the Badlands, viewed via GoogleMap. One is a bombing target carved into the earth by the military (the bottom portion of the target is less visible, so it may be grazed now, and if so, I am guessing there is a cattle-fence running through the center of the old target). The other location is a Sundance (ceremonial) site. Sacred and Profane; within field-glass view of each other.  It is hard to shift our perspectives.  Try walking around all day looking at the world through a magnifying glass.  The fact that we can see our daily terrain from the perspective of plane-photos and satellite imagery is really a major paradigm-shift. Here is an aerial view of the Minuteman Missile Silo I visited, just north of the Badlands…. and the aerial view of a Badlands prairie dog town. I am really amazed that all of these patterns are so strikingly visible at such distances.

Just north of the Badlands, at Cactus Flats, there is a small National Historic Site dedicated to an unsettling reminder of the Cold War: missile silos. In South Dakota alone, there were 150 nuclear-tipped Minuteman Missile silos “planted” in ranchlands, ready to strike targets in the Soviet Union after a short 30-minute flight over the North Pole.

Several of these sites (Delta and Bravo units — each with a Launch Facility and 10 missile silos) were just north of the Badlands’s boundary. There isn’t a real “Visitor Center” yet, but that will soon be built. Tours start with a short movie, providing history and context regarding the Cold War, then everyone proceeds up the interstate — first to the Delta Launch Control Facility, which can easily be viewed from I-90 if you know what you are looking for, and ultimately to a missile silo further west. Yes, there really is a sign at the bottom of that exit ramp now, reading

<— MISSILE SILO

Although buried, the silos were never exactly “hidden” but for most citizens I think the adage “out of sight out of mind” applies. Who wanted to think about nuclear annihilation? Thankfully, the Minutemen Missiles were deactivated as part of the START treaty. In most cases, it seems that the military removed the missile and dynamited the silo facility before returning these imploded sites to ranch-owners with long lists of prohibited uses (limited reusability). Through Minutemen Missile NHS, visitors can see the one silo that has been preserved in situ, like a terrible fossil worm, with the warhead removed, some internal parts filled with cement and components of the launching mechanisms welded together, rendering them “dead” but plenty realistic. It is also a powerful experience to stand in the underground control center, which is like a buried spaceship, where two men would have needed to insert their two keys simultaneously, to activate the launch sequence….

This interesting-but-eerie site, a shrine to our collective cold-war angst, is located spitting distance from the interstate, with the menacing teeth of the Pinnacles visible in the distance.

For more information, including a movie, panoramic photographs of rarely-seen sites, history and maps of minuteman missile silo locations, see: Minuteman Missile National Historic Site
http://www.nps.gov/mimi/index.htm

This historic railroad grade formerly connected all the small towns between here and Rapid City, including Kadoka (see photo of Kadoka mill above), Interior, Scenic and probably some others (Conata, Weta) that are now just dusty names on a map. This leg of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad (Murdo to Rapid City) was built in 1907 and hauled passengers, agricultural products, you name it. The age of the railroad officially ended in 1980. Some of the small reservoirs along the route, now used by grazing cattle, were once used for the steam locomotives. In some ways, the great era of trains on the Great Plains started to decline way back in the era of the dust bowls, when it had just begun a few decades earlier. Many trestles are standing, but some were in tough shape. No evidence that this is being used as a rails-to-trails route yet.  PS:  I noticed that the old train station in Kadoka has been turned into a museum.

I’m going to share this link to a song called “The L&N don’t stop here anymore” as covered by Johnny Cash, since I was listening to Johnny Cash yesterday as I drove the White River Road.  I originally learned the song through Michelle Shocked’s version.  The song is specifically set in a former coal-mining town, where men were covered in black coal dust, but it resonates for me since I grew up on a farm where we could once hear the whistle of passing trains, and there was a feed mill down at crossing. At the grain mill in the next town, I remember, our neighbor worked — his head and arms floured white with grain dust.  Those rails are long gone, as is the mill, except the indelible part preserved like a fossil in my memory.

Alligator-skin cracking

Originally uploaded by miss_distance

One day of sun and voila! Dry as the Sahara desert! Right?

Nope. This appears bone-dry, but actually only the surface is dry — one special characteristic of the Chadron formation is how it absorbs water. The clays lying just underneath this cracked skin are still slick.