July 28, 2017
CapitalPress.com
7
Oregon
Toxic tansy ragwort makes
a comeback in W. Oregon
By ALIYA HALL
Capital Press
Courtesy of Portland Audubon
A male bald eagle rests at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Portland. It was captured June 28 near
Gaston, Ore. An examination showed it had been shot. Rewards totaling $7,500 are being offered for
the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.
Reward offered in shooting of bald eagle
By ERIC MORTENSON
Capital Press
PORTLAND — Rewards
totaling $7,500 are offered for
information leading to the ar-
rest and conviction of the per-
son who shot a bald eagle near
Gaston, Ore., in late June.
The eagle was captured by
an Oregon State Police trooper
June 28 and taken to the Port-
land Audubon’s wildlife reha-
bilitation center in Portland. It
had been reported injured the
previous week but was still able
to fly at that point and wasn’t
caught. The trooper later re-
turned to the area and caught
the eagle after following it
through brush, a marsh and into
a field. The bird was found near
Old Highway 47 and Looking
Courtesy of Portland Audubon
A bullet wound sustained by a
bald eagle. It’s being treated at
an animal rehabilitation center
in Portland but its longterm
prognosis is unknown.
Glass Drive north of Gaston, a
small community southwest of
Portland.
The male eagle appears
to have been shot in its right
shoulder. The bird is in a reha-
bilitation flight cage at the care
center; its longterm prognosis is
not known at this point, a center
spokeswoman said.
Although no longer on the
endangered species list, bald
eagles remain protected un-
der the federal Migratory Bird
Treaty Act and the Bald and
Golden Eagle Protection Act.
It’s illegal to hunt, capture, in-
jure or kill them. The crime is
punishable by up to a $5,000
fine and a year in jail.
The Animal League De-
fense Fund has posted a $5,000
reward in the case, and Portland
Audubon added $1,500 to the
fund. In addition, the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service is offering
a $1,000 reward.
ODFW confirms wolf attack on calf
By ERIC MORTENSON
Capital Press
A 250-pound calf found
with numerous bites and
scrapes was attacked by a
wolf, an Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife investiga-
tion confirmed.
A rancher noticed the in-
juries July 21 while moving
cattle on a public grazing allot-
ment in the Harl Butte area of
Wallowa County, in northeast
Oregon. The cow and calf pair
were hauled back to the home
ranch. ODFW was notified and
investigated the following day.
The calf had multiple bites
and scrapes on its back legs,
including one open wound
that was 4 inches long and 3
inches wide. The size, loca-
tion and direction of the bites
were “consistent with common
attack points for wolves,” ac-
cording to an ODFW report.
The calf was alert and re-
sponsive, according to the re-
port. The injuries were estimat-
ed to be about seven days old.
Tracking collar data showed
a wolf designated OR-50 was
in the grazing area during the
time the attack is thought to
have occurred.
The toxic weed tansy
ragwort has spread this year
around Western Oregon with
particularly large populations
in Marion and Clackamas
counties.
The outbreak is the worst
Sam Leininger, WeedWise
program manager, has seen in
the program’s eight years of
operation. WeedWise began in
2008 to “support more effective
management of invasive weeds
in Clackamas County,” accord-
ing to its website.
Tansy is dangerous to hu-
mans and livestock because
of a poisonous alkaloid in the
plant’s tissue that causes liver
damage when eaten. Signs of
poisoning are consistent with
liver failure, said Dr. Charles
Estill, Oregon State University
Extension veterinary agent.
“Horses get jaundiced, le-
thargic, slow, depressed, stop
chewing in the middle of eat-
ing and wandering — some die
from the wandering, from ei-
ther walking off a cliff or walk-
ing into a pond and drowning,”
said Estill.
While grazing animals gen-
erally avoid eating tansy, heavi-
ly infested pastures or hay con-
taminated with the weed can
make it nearly impossible for
the animals to avoid consump-
tion. If tansy is more than 5 per-
cent of the plants in a pasture, it
creates an opportunity for tox-
icity, Estill said.
Young animals are especial-
ly susceptible because “they
have different physiology or
not as much life experience,”
he said, as well as being less
discriminating in what they eat.
Tansy can take anywhere
from two weeks to six months
to kill an animal. No treatment
is available.
“(An animal) can ingest it
now and die at Christmastime,”
Estill said. Most cases are sus-
pected and not confirmed.
There haven’t been any re-
ported cases so far this year of
Courtesy of Wash. Noxious Weed
Control Board
Tansy ragwort, also known as
stinking willie and staggerwort,
has increased this year in parts of
Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The
alkaloid in the plant causes toxici-
ty to cattle, horses and humans.
animals killed by tansy con-
sumption, but it is too early in
the year to know, said Dr. Mor-
rie Craig, professor of toxicolo-
gy at Oregon State’s veterinari-
an research laboratory.
Unlike horses and cattle,
sheep have ruminal microbes
in their stomach that can eat the
alkaloids that the tansy produc-
es. Craig said research is under-
way to take advantage of these
ruminal microbes.
“We’re thinking we’re go-
ing to try a way to capsulate
ruminal microbes, and make a
probiotic out of it that you can
give to a cow,” Craig said, “and
then it’ll have the microbes in
its stomach to break it down.”
Tansy ragwort is identifiable
by its flat yellow flowers at the
top of the plant. The stems are
green — occasionally with a
reddish tinge — and the leaves
are ruffled and dark green, ac-
cording to WeedWise. At ma-
turity, the plant can grow up
to 6 feet tall and produce up to
200,000 seeds that remain in
the soil for more than 10 years.
The infestation is most
likely caused by the cool, wet
and mild springs that Oregon
has had for the past two years,
Leininger said. The conditions
have undermined biological
controls such as the Cinnabar
moth and flea beetle, which
during the larval stage eat the
roots of the plant. They were
introduced from 1960 to 1971
by the Oregon Department of
Agriculture. By the mid-1980s
cattle deaths by tansy had been
reduced by more than 90 per-
cent, a report from the ODA
said.
Tim Butler. manager of
ODA’s Noxious Weed Control
Program, explained that bio-
logical controls work on a cycle
with the plant.
“With a crash in the tansy
population we have the mirror
image of the bio-controls drop-
ping off. Then when the (tan-
sy) comes back there will be a
lag time for the fleas to come
back,” he said. “People who
want to get more bio-controls,
we can’t supply anything that’s
going to speed up the natural
process. It won’t make a sig-
nificant difference.”
At this point, it’s too late
to spray the weeds with herbi-
cide, he said.
“Spraying won’t do any-
thing. The time to spray is
early spring when it’s a ro-
sette, or in fall after the rain,”
Butler said.
Mowing the tansy when
it’s in full bloom isn’t a solu-
tion, either, because it can
cause plants to become short-
lived perennials, and grow
back next year.
However, Butler under-
stands the motivation behind
mowing, whether it’s to ap-
pease neighbors or make the
pastures look better.
WeedWise encourages re-
moving the seed heads and
putting them into bags to
keep seeds from spreading.
If there is a concern about
exposure to cattle and horses,
Leininger said to remove the
tansy from the field.
“Some (people) want to
pull it and leave it, but the
plant’s potability can in-
crease in its wilt phase,”
Leininger said. “You have to
understand it’s a big task, but
preventing seeding is the ide-
al scenario.”
Transload facility could speed
onion delivery, open markets
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
Sean Ellis/Capital Press File
An onion field is shown in this
photo taken outside Ontario,
Ore. Producers say a planned
rail transload facility in Malheur
County will speed delivery and
possibly open new markets.
for Snake River Produce.
In an email, she told Capital
Press that the facility would be
“transformational for our area
and will ideally allow Snake
River Produce and other area
shippers to maintain and im-
prove competitiveness, reduce
transportation costs and grow
business throughout the rail
network.”
Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-On-
tario, vice-co-chairman of the
14-member committee that put
the transportation bill together,
told onion growers and ship-
pers last week that the money
for the transload facility could
be a once-in-a-lifetime oppor-
tunity and he said it’s critical
for the community to do it right.
He said the facility could
benefit a lot of farm commod-
ities grown in the region but
that it would focus on the onion
industry.
The legislation that provides
the $26 million for the facili-
ty requires the community to
submit a plan to the Oregon
Transportation Commission by
Jan. 1, 2020, that shows how it
intends to spend the money.
One of the most important
first steps is for the onion in-
dustry to form a committee that
can offer significant input on
the plan and help guide its for-
mation, Bentz said.
30-3/#18
30-2/#4N
ONTARIO, Ore. — A
planned rail transload facility
in Oregon’s Malheur County
could reduce transportation
costs for onion shippers in the
region but, perhaps more im-
portantly, it could also speed up
delivery times and open up new
markets.
Speeding up the time it
takes the Spanish bulb onions
grown here to reach markets
on the East Coast would be the
main advantage of a transload
facility, said Eddie Rodriguez,
director of sales for Partners
Produce, one of 30 onion ship-
pers in the Treasure Valley of
Idaho and Oregon.
“Getting our product to the
market sooner is the biggest
benefit to us,” he said.
Because onions produced
here and shipped by rail to
the East Coast have to first be
trucked West to the nearest
transload facility in Wallula,
Wash., before beginning their
journey east, Washington on-
ion shippers beat their Idaho
and Oregon competitors to the
market at every turn, Rodri-
guez said.
“Because we’ll be able to
get to the market sooner, that
will open up more markets
for us,” he said of the planned
transload facility, which
would be built near Ontario or
Nyssa.
The Oregon Legislature’s
recently passed $5.3 billion
transportation bill includes $26
million for the transload facil-
ity, which will allow shipping
containers to be transferred be-
tween truck and rail.
Freight rates change con-
stantly and are impacted by
many factors, but “it is fair to
estimate a transload facility
(here) would provide an avenue
to ship more onion volume via
rail out of our growing region at
a cost savings versus trucking,
and faster than traditional rail
service,” said Tiffany Cruick-
shank, transportation manager