Applegater July-August 2008 9
BIRDMAN
APPLEGATE OUTBACK: MY OPINION
Coastal birding
You want to smell
like a man
BY TED GLOVER
BY BOB FISCHER
A trip along the Oregon and Washington coasts is great any time of the year,
but springtime is especially beautiful. A mass of scotch broom in yellow splendor
greets the traveler everywhere and the rhododendron, azaleas, bleeding heart,
camas, dogwood—even Oregon grape—add color all along the roadways.
With the spring migration underway, a full assortment of songbirds is visible
at every stop. Warblers abound, as do swallows, grosbeaks, tanagers and fl ycatchers.
Along the shores and inlets we spotted hundreds of western and glaucous-winged
gulls, along with many Wilson’s phalaropes whirling around in circles as they fed
on mosquito larvae and small insects.
Farther out in the ocean waters and along the small rocks that dot the coast,
we spotted pelagic cormorants, with their distinctive white fl ank patches, and the
pigeon guillemot, with its conspicuous white wing patches. A highlight was spotting
a male Pacifi c loon with its pale gray head and black and white checkered back.
Farther north in the Olympic range we
saw many gray jays and red crossbills, along
with pine siskins and American goldfi nch. The
best thing of all, however, was watching the
spectacular display of the male blue sooty grouse
attempting to attract the female by infl ating
colorful neck sacs of yellow and red. We saw
several of these birds on the trip to Hurricane
Ridge. All in all, we saw 121 species of birds on
our ten-day jaunt.
Ted A. Glover • 541-846-0681
Photos clockwise from top:
Heermann’s gull (Larus heermanni); Ring-billed gull (Larus delawarensis); Western gull
(Larus occidentalis); and Pelagic cormorant (Phalacrocorax pelagicus).
Photos by Mike Baird, www.bairdphotos.com
BIOMASS
tons of yard debris and wood waste
are collected annually from all of
Jackson and Josephine Counties. That’s
a lot of potential electricity! With the
rising costs of fossil fuels, someday
it might be economically feasible for
someone to set up a local electrical
cogeneration plant right here. But in
the meantime . . .
What should we do? We might
want to consider taking up Biomass
One’s offer to pick up our wood waste.
Before we start identifying a drop-
off site or hiring a sorter, though, it
makes sense to see if our residents
and businesses would even support
this kind of operation. Some of you
will be selected at random this summer
to answer this very question. A short
multiple-choice survey form will be
mailed; you’ll be able to fi ll it out in just
a couple of minutes and send it back
via postage-paid return envelope. I’ll be
working at Southern Oregon University
to tabulate the results. So give me a call
if you have any ideas or questions. I’d
FROM PAGE 8
love to hear from you. I’ll publish the
results in late fall.
For now, the Rough and Ready
Lumber Mill four miles south of Cave
Junction says they’ll be happy to take
your logs or wood chips if you’d like to
sell them for energy conversion. You
can call the mill at 541-592-3116 if
you have any questions. Biomass One
accepts a much wider variety of woody
waste debris and will take it off your
hands if you want to haul it to White
City and pay a small tipping fee. Biomass
One can be reached at 541-826-9422.
Tom Carstens
541-846-1025
Photos:
1. The author in front of a week’s supply
of “hog fuel.”
2. Loading waste into Biomass One’s
portable grinder.
4. Off loading biomass
3. Biomass One Generator
5. Biomass One’s electrostatic
precipitators
6. The author with Rough and Ready’s
steam turbine.
In the beginning, it is probably
safe to say that man smelled as strong
as the animals he pursued and those
that pursued him. At some point,
man’s opposing thumb and forefi nger
just naturally allowed him to develop
a spoken language.
The fi rst sentences must have
been, “Would you mind moving
downwind, Torg? Your body odor is
enough to gag a maggot.”
The next few thousand years
were spent searching for scents and
perfumes that changed or masked the
human aroma.
“We are civilized, we don’t like
being predators and we sure as heck
don’t want to smell like them.”
For a long time we smelled like
fl owers, then citrus fruits and vegetables
became popular scents. Recently the
trend is toward more natural aromatic
statements. Man is not quite ready to
smell like a man. But at least hunters
are willing to smell like other animals.
Specifi cally, like other animals’ urine.
Seriously! There are a lot of
hunting products out there that allow
us to smell like deer or elk urine. As
much as I would like to get a big buck
or bull elk each year, I’m not sure it
would be worth smelling like urine to
do so.
I used to hunt with a friend
named John Kilroy, who works at the
Jackson County Court House. John
worked hard at changing his own odor
into something else. He used doe-in-
estrus urine on calm days and skunk
scent on windy days. His skunk scent
came from a dispenser attached to his
hat.
Maybe the reason for my friend’s
hunting success was that he changed
his scent one other way: When we
crossed a deer trail he went through
the droppings like your mother tests
grapes in the supermarket. Squeezing
and jabbing, crushing and sniffi ng.
That was in the woods. At home
he couldn’t change a dirty diaper or
clean up the puppy’s mess without
gagging.
Even after his second child, his
wife handled the messy jobs, saying,
“John has such a weak stomach.”
He was a master! The guy
who walked around smelling like a
skunk and finding fresh deer dung
had his wife convinced he had a weak
stomach—a truly gifted man.
My present hunting partners,
Rick Montoya and Rick Colbert, also
take the hunter scent very seriously.
Montoya tries to overpower the human
scent, not change it.
One day Montoya, Colbert and
I were at our hunting camp preparing
for a morning deer hunt. Montoya
was splashing himself with a strong
smelling liquid, dousing his hat, boots,
armpits and the area best described
as the confluence
o f h i s a n a t o my.
“Wherever you develop smell, that’s
where you need it,” Montoya explained
without stopping. “Montoya, isn’t that
turpentine?” I asked.
“Sure! Turpentine is a natural
compound and smells like the woods.
Plus, it’s powerful enough to erase the
human scent,” he said.
“Yes, but it also is powerful
enough to peel paint. Are you sure you
want it near your skin?”
“No problem,” Montoya said
condescendingly. “Modern fabrics, like
the ones you see adorning my body, are
designed to wick moisture away from
the skin, not toward it. Remember, it
wicketh away, it does not wicketh in.”
This last Shakespearian statement was
given with turpentine can held high.
Ten minutes from camp, Montoya
began to twitch about on the truck seat
in convulsive movements, not normally
a cause for concern, but he was driving.
At the same time, he began speaking
in tongues, a little surprising even for
Montoya.
“Montoya, are you all right?”
Colbert asked.
“EERPP WHEEEFFF!” he
said with feeling. At this point the
truck began doing things on the gravel
road that were not consistent with the
undulations of the road itself.
“Montoya, are you all right?”
Colbert repeated. The truck went
sideways and stopped. We bailed out
of the truck just in time to hear an elk
herd crash through the dark woods.
Montoya was doing a dance in
front of the headlights that would
have made a headless chicken proud.
At the same time, he was ripping off
his clothing as fast as he could get a
handhold. Colbert and I tried to help
alleviate the poor man’s suffering, but
we couldn’t catch our breath between
guffaws.
Throughout this sequence,
Montoya was making noises that sounded
like a coyote in heat. “OOOOWEEEEO-
W O W O W O W O W O -
WOWOWOOOO!” he said caninely.
Then, ‘WATER, WATER, WATER,
WATER, HURRY, HURRY, HURRY,
HURRY, PLEEEZE!”
I threw him my canteen, because
it is not safe to get near a guy who rips
his clothes off in the middle of a road
in the headlights of a truck! Montoya
began to wash himself at a rapid rate.
“It just goes to show you,”
Colbert said, as we watched Montoya
doing things to himself that would
have meant a jail ter m in most
cities, “turpentine wicketh where it
wanteth to!”
Bob Fischer
541-846-6218