6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, APRIL 21, 2017
Orchestra: It includes the mandola, mandocello and mandobass
Continued from Page 1A
Conducted by Brian Ober-
lin, the musical director and
founder, the performance will
feature guest soloist Evan Mar-
shall, a renowned virtuoso.
Played with a pick, the man-
dolin is best known for the dis-
tinctive tremolo sound, a high-
speed plucking that sustains a
note and serves the same pur-
pose as bow strokes on a violin.
“Where the bowed instru-
ments have that nice 18-inch
bow that they can draw a note
or series of notes with, we have
to hit those strings a lot,” said
Michael Tognetti, a mando-
linist and board member of
the orchestra and the Classical
Mandolin Society of America.
That tremolo sound has
been described as “musical
rain.” “I think of it more as just
my favorite musical sound in
the whole universe,” Marshall
said.
Marshall — who for 12
years performed at Disneyland
playing the William Tell Over-
ture at an absurdly fast pace
— slips chords into his trem-
olos, his famous “duo” style.
“It sounds as if two people are
playing at once,” Bella said.
were mandolin orchestras
in every city, every school,
every church, mostly because
the mandolin manufacturers
pushed it,” Bella, a retired Ore-
gonian reporter, said.
Even as its popularity faded,
the instrument crept into songs
by Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart
and R.E.M. (think of the 1991
track “Losing My Religion”).
Casual music listeners know
what the mandolin sounds like,
even if they don’t know it as
mandolin music .
Bella, who played violin in
his youth, acquired a mando-
lin from a roommate who owed
him money. He took the instru-
ment instead. It had no strings,
‘You can play anything’
During the mandolin’s
period of prominence, “there
no break, no tailpiece and a
busted tuner, and had been liv-
ing in a cardboard box. Bella
fi xed it up, and taught himself
to play.
Its versatility appealed to
him. “You can play folk. You
can play classical. You can play
jazz. You can play rock,” he
said. “You can play anything.”
Bella played into the 1970s,
then took a roughly 35-year
break while he focused on his
journalism career. But, as the
mandolin laid low in the popu-
lar awareness, so did it lie dor-
mant in Bella’s heart for 35
years.
In the early 2000s, he heard
the Seattle Mandolin Orches-
orchestra — your violins, your
violas, etc. We bring a different
color,” Tognetti said.
Marshall and Oberlin —
who are steeped in the classi-
cal, Italian serenade, Western
swing and bluegrass traditions
— have a separate collabora-
tion called the Twin Mando-
lin Slingers and released a duo
album in 2015.
“Without his permission,”
Marshall said, “we collabo-
rated with Johann Strauss,”
turning a waltz by the 19th cen-
tury Austrian composer it into a
Western s wing song with origi-
nal lyrics written by Oberlin —
a piece they plan to perform in
Astoria.
tra perform in Edmonds, Wash-
ington. It reawakened some-
thing in him. And when, shortly
thereafter, he started singing
with a friend, “I got the itch,”
he said.
Soon he was playing reg-
ularly. He wrote a story about
the Oregon Mandolin Orches-
tra the year after its founding,
and joined in 2013.
‘A different color’
The Oregon Mandolin
Orchestra includes other mem-
bers of the mandolin family: the
mandola, mandocello and man-
dobass are represented.
“You have a certain color
when you go to see a string
Owls: Barred owls are from the East Coast and gradually moved west
Northern spotted
owl study areas *
example, has a much higher
density of barred owls, he said.
Even if it does work, land
managers might be required
to revisit areas and shoot more
barred owls to keep them at
bay.
Lingering in the back-
ground is whether wildlife biol-
ogists should be killing barred
owls at all.
“It is gut-wrenching,” said
Wiens . “It is for all of us.”
He said barred owls are an
apex predator that has “com-
pletely taken over” spotted owl
habitat. “This experiment is a
way to get a handle on that.”
Diller, who died in March,
once called it a “Sophie’s
Choice” dilemma.
“Shooting a beautiful rap-
tor that is remarkably adapt-
able and fi t for its new envi-
ronment seems unpalatable and
ethically wrong,” he wrote in
Wildlife Professional magazine
in 2013. “But the choice to do
nothing is also unpalatable, and
I believe also ethically wrong.”
If human action such as
logging caused major alter-
ations to spotted owl habitat,
and development paved the
way for barred owls to move
west, “Don’t we have a socie-
tal responsibility to at least give
them a fi ghting chance to sur-
vive?” Diller asked.
‘Sophie’s Choice’
“It’s way too early to say,”
said David Wiens, a raptor
ecologist with the U.S. Geolog-
ical Survey. Diller’s work was
“defi nitive evidence” that spot-
ted owls’ decline was reversed
on Green Diamond Resource
land, but conditions elsewhere
are much different, Wiens said.
The Oregon Coast Range, for
CANADA
VANCOUVER
ISLAND
Bellingham
20
(Results for March 2015-Dec. 2016.)
Study area and
treatment type
Area
(acres)
1. Cle Elum
Treatment
Control
149,250
165,560
5
Spotted Barred
owl sites owl sites
46
31
2
Wenatchee
113
110
101
1
Olympia
2. Coast Ranges
Treatment
Control
149,990
268,105
45
58
106
176
3. Klamath/Union/Myrtle
Treatment
Control
193,480
172,475
84
78
144
124
90
Yakima
5
Ocean
Species Act and wildlife resto-
ration projects undertaken by
government agencies. They
often referred to the poten-
tial rangeland restrictions that
might accompany an ESA list-
ing for greater sage grouse as
“the spotted owl on steroids.”
They’ve also dealt with wolves
spreading into the four states
and attacking livestock.
Northern spotted owls were
listed as threatened under the
act in 1990, which greatly
reduced logging in the Pacifi c
Northwest, especially on fed-
eral land. Their continued
decline could result in it getting
listed as endangered, which
might bring even more restric-
tions on human activities in the
woods.
So far, nothing has worked.
The Northwest Forest Plan set
aside 18.5 million acres of the
older forests that spotted owls
prefer. “But then the barred owl
emerged as a threat capable of
sweeping through the entire
range of the northern spotted
owl,” researcher Diller wrote
in a 2013 magazine article.
Barred owls are from the
East Coast and appear to have
moved west over the decades,
following development. They
are 15 to 20 percent larger than
spotted owls, which Diller
called “the human equivalent
of a heavyweight going up
against a middleweight.”
Working on forest land
owned by Green Diamond
Resource Co., and with federal
permission, Diller and fellow
researchers killed dozens of
barred owls over fi ve years and
documented the return of spot-
ted owls. The work had star-
tling results. Spotted owls “rap-
idly re-occupied” areas where
barred owls were removed,
Diller wrote. In one case, a
female spotted owl returned to
a nesting site seven years after
she’d been last seen.
Overall, Diller’s work
showed “removal of barred
owls in combination with hab-
itat conservation could slow
or even reverse population
declines at a local scale.”
Researchers don’t know if
that success will be repeated.
*A fourth study area is in Northern California where barred owls are
being removed from Hoopa Valley tribal land.
The spotted owl was
listed as threatened
under the Endangered
Species act in 1990.
The two main threats
to this owl are habitat
loss and competition
from the barred owl,
a non-native species.
WASHINGTON
82
umbia River
C ol
Vancouver
84
Portland
Pacific
Continued from Page 1A
101
97
26
22
2
26
20
126
Eugene
Bend
OREGON
20
5
3
Study area type
42
101
Treatment (barred
owls removed)
N
Sources: U.S. Geological Survey;
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
Control (no barred
owls removed)
25 miles
Medford
Alan Kenaga/Capital
Press
/ EO Media
Group
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