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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, MAY 29, 2017
Plovers: Chick is now 2 weeks old
Continued from Page 1A
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, far left, speaks with the audience
after a town hall meeting Sunday in Warrenton.
Merkley: Touched
on several topics
Continued from Page 1A
Losing coverage
The Congressional Bud-
get Office estimated that
the American Health Care
Act, which narrowly passed
the U.S. House this month
but faces long odds in the
U.S. Senate, would cost 14
million additional Ameri-
cans medical coverage next
year, and 23 million by
2023. A recent state analy-
sis concluded that more than
400,000 Oregonians would
lose coverage under the bill
by 2026. The state was an
early adopter of Medicaid
expansion under the Oregon
Health Plan.
“If they were holding
hands, it would stretch from
the Pacific Ocean, here, all
the way to the border with
Idaho,” Merkley said of
Oregonians who could lose
coverage, echoing a similar
comment he’s made at other
town halls.
Merkley said the legisla-
tion breaks several promises
about coverage, quality and
affordability made by Pres-
ident Donald Trump, while
raising the average monthly
health care costs for a
64-year-old making $26,000
a year from $140 to $1,200
a month.
Dr. Holly Barker, a sur-
geon at Providence Seaside
Hospital, said she is con-
cerned over the potential of
the legislation to gut Med-
icaid and increase uncom-
pensated care at the region’s
two critical access hospitals,
already operating at the mar-
gin. “It’s going to affect the
hospitals to such a degree
that we could be talking
shutdown,” she said, ask-
ing what safety nets the bill
might have.
Merkley said the bill con-
tains no safety nets. “It’s
why we’ve got to stop this
bill. It’s that simple,” he said.
Getting involved
Barbara Linnett, a retired
nurse from Astoria, asked
Merkley how locals could
get involved in national con-
tests of consequence in the
2018 midterm elections, and
in finding a strong presiden-
tial candidate to run in 2020.
Merkley, taking a non-
partisan approach, said citi-
zen engagement is key.
Republican senators are
planning their own version
of the health care legislation
to be passed by reconcili-
ation, a legislative maneu-
ver requiring only a simple
majority of 51 votes instead
of 60, the number required to
break a filibuster.
“We don’t know what
that plan will look like, but
obviously I’m concerned
about that,” he said.
Merkley said voters
flooding House legisla-
tors’ email inboxes, phone
lines and the streets is what
defeated the first version of
the American Health Care
Act and almost stopped the
second.
“It needs to happen on
the Senate side,” he said,
urging people to reach out
through their various pro-
fessional, hobby and other
associations.
Merkley touched on sev-
eral other topics, prompted
by questions and himself:
• Doug Thompson of
Astoria asked why Merkley,
a staunch progressive who
has co-sponsored multiple
bills to move the U.S. away
from fossil fuels, has con-
tinued to support the con-
troversial proposed Jordan
Cove liquefied natural gas
terminal. Merkley, who has
remained neutral on the Jor-
dan Cove project, said “Coos
Bay should be able to make
their case.”
• Merkley said he has
been calling since Febru-
ary for a special prosecu-
tor to investigate claims of
collusion by Russia and the
Trump campaign during the
presidential election. He
said Russia has developed
the biggest operation for
interfering not only in the
U.S. but in other elections
worldwide, trying to under-
mine democratic republics,
and that a bipartisan effort
is needed to figure out what
happened in November’s
election and build better
defenses.
• Warrenton junior Maria
Heyen said she is starting to
look into colleges but is con-
cerned about the rising cost
of tuition and loans. Merkley
said the U.S. needs a fund-
ing mechanism that makes
higher education feasible for
all, calling for the protec-
tion against cuts to the fed-
eral Pell Grant program and
the lowering of student loan
interest rates.
• Retired teacher Wendela
Howie said her main issue is
the right and access to pub-
lic education. Merkley said
Oregon, which has the low-
est corporate tax rates in
the U.S., can’t support good
public education without
more revenue.
• In closing, Merkley said
the fight needs to continue to
overturn the Citizens United
U.S. Supreme Court deci-
sion that has flooded elec-
tions with outside money.
Rangers restrict access to the
southern portion of the 4-mile-
long sand spit that makes up
Nehalem Bay State Park begin-
ning in May and continuing
through the entirety of the plo-
ver nesting season. Now with
a confirmed hatchling on the
beach, these restrictions had
become even more crucial.
The park is located just
below Manzanita, a town often
overrun with tourists in the
summer, and park rangers were
expecting a crowd over the long
weekend. Blackstone wanted
to know where the chick was
before the weekend hit, the bet-
ter to warn people away from
areas where it might be feeding
or resting.
She had a hunch that the
chick, now 2 weeks old and
very mobile, may have moved
northwards with its parent,
looking for food outside the
protected nesting area. Male
plovers look after chicks once
they hatch while females con-
tinue to mate and establish
nests.
Dangers
If you are on a sandy beach
littered with driftwood and bro-
ken sea shells, everything looks
like a western snowy plover:
that tan stone, those scattered
puffs of sea foam, the pile of
twigs and dried grass the wind
just caught and stirred.
Blackstone moved slowly,
shouldering a spotting scope on
a tripod. She started out look-
ing for tracks because where
there were tracks there could
be birds.
Plovers feed on small inver-
tebrates. As they forage for
food, they run in straight lines,
pause, look around, then dash
suddenly to the side to snag
prey. The distinctive, slightly
pigeon-toed tracks they leave
behind reflect these sudden
starts, stops and right-angle
turns.
Last Thursday, Blackstone
found little evidence of plo-
ver activity at the southern
end of the beach where signs
warn people away from plo-
ver nesting areas. She turned
north towards Manzanita, stop-
ping every few steps to scan the
beach with her scope.
Sanderlings, another small,
fast-moving shorebird, scurried
along the wet sand. Up above
the dunes, a crow slid side-
ways on the wind, head quest-
ing from right to left. It sent a
shadow rippling over wave-
prints in the dry sand.
Predators haven’t yet fig-
ured out that the sparrow-sized
plovers and their even smaller
eggs — and now chick — are
Wildlife biologist Vanessa
Blackstone demonstrates
how the western snowy
plover leaves tracks in the
sand on the beaches of Ne-
halem Bay State Park.
Photos by Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
Wildlife biologist Vanessa Blackstone searches the area
for signs of the western snowy plover.
here, as far as Blackstone can
tell. Elsewhere in Oregon, plo-
ver nesting grounds are a buffet
for gulls, coyotes and corvids
like crows and ravens. Wildlife
biologists often sweep away
their footprints after checking
on plover nests to avoid leading
predators right to them. In Cal-
ifornia and southern Oregon,
the states and U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service have had to
consider lethal options in con-
trolling problem predators.
One western gull in south-
ern Oregon figured out that plo-
ver parents will flee their nests
when disturbed, hoping to draw
predators away. They’ll flut-
ter down the beach, pretending
their wing is broken: “Eat me!
Eat me! I’m easy to catch!” The
gull ignored them and pillaged
10 nests in a single day.
Home base
But crows and gulls aren’t
the only issue.
Snowy plovers see dan-
ger everywhere. A dog, sniff-
ing around and oblivious to
a nest — usually only a shal-
low scrape in the dry sand —
can send parents scurrying. So
can a beachcomber wandering
among the dunes, or a colorful
plastic kite fluttering overhead.
“One person, one dog, one
kite, they’ll get over it,” Black-
stone said. But when another
person goes by a few minutes
later, followed by another dog
or another kite, plover par-
ents are constantly hopping off
eggs.
“So many nests fail because
they get cold,” Blackstone said.
“Certainly within the spe-
cies you see a range of tol-
erance for disturbance,” said
Eleanor Gaines, a conser-
vation biologist who works
with the Oregon Biodiversity
Information Center. The cen-
ter has tracked plover num-
bers since the 1990s when they
first became federally listed as
a threatened species under the
Endangered Species Act. The
center provides information to
the different state and federal
groups involved in snowy plo-
ver recovery efforts.
In Oregon, the beaches are
relatively remote. In California,
plovers nest on beaches heavily
used by people.
“They rope them off (in Cal-
ifornia), but the birds do seem
to tolerate more human distur-
bance than we see up here,”
Gaines said.
Plovers have what biologists
call “site fidelity.” Once they
successfully nest somewhere,
they tend to come back. It is
part of what makes news of the
chick in Nehalem so encourag-
ing. If it survives to adulthood,
it too will return someday.
North
Blackstone walked for more
than an hour, slowly zig-zag-
ging from where high tide had
deposited a chain of beach
debris then up to dry sand. She
paused to look for tracks or to
look through her scope, not-
ing other bird species, puzzling
over unfamiliar tracks.
Then: “Western snowy plo-
ver! I knew they were going to
go north.”
The adult plover was hard to
see unless it moved. Blackstone
pondered it through her scope.
A sudden movement at the plo-
ver’s side made her do a dou-
ble take. Two birds? No: The
chick!
Minutes later, the parent,
spotting Blackstone and report-
ers from The Daily Astorian,
would be running back and
forth across the sand — “Eat
me! Eat me!” — and the chick
would have disappeared, hid-
ing somewhere nearby. But
for now, the gangly hatchling
covered in a patchy fuzz with
its long legs and useless “little
chicken wings” bobbed next to
its parent.
“Only 1,000 yards north
of where we want him,” Park
Ranger Ken Murphy would
later sigh when Blackstone told
him the news.
‘Guided luck’
The chick, and the new nest,
are not flukes.
“More like guided luck,”
said Chris Havel, associate
director with Oregon Parks and
Recreation. “With some tweak-
ing of the ground and help from
visitors, a traditional breeding
ground can regain some of its
former attractiveness.”
“But you never can tell
what will happen next,” he
added, “and this could be the
start of a more wild, more natu-
ral Nehalem spit, or something
could interrupt the process and
we’ll need to reset our sights on
next year.”
The work they’ve done,
though, and the nests they’ve
seen “improves the odds.”
Laura Todd, field supervisor
with the U.S. Fish and Wild-
life Service in Oregon, began
her career right before western
snowy plovers were listed. She
can say that she saw a species
rebound from extinction.
Someday, she and others
hope the presence of snowy
plovers will again be unremark-
able on Oregon’s North Coast.
“The more and more birds
that we get, the more pressures
they can withstand,” Todd said.
“We’re hoping at some point
we can step back.”
Conservationists are get-
ting very close to their recov-
ery goals, at least as far as
some numbers go in managed
areas in Oregon and Washing-
ton state.
It doesn’t mean they’re close
to delisting, Todd said, “But it
does mean we can breathe a lit-
tle easier.”
“There will come a day
when it’s, ‘Oh, another nest at
Nehalem,’” Blackstone said.
Volunteers: ‘Seeing it change is really amazing’
Continued from Page 1A
approach once dominated by
Scotch broom.
“Seeing it change is really
amazing,” she said.
It has taken a combination
of longtime volunteers and
new volunteers like Rippey to
bring about this change. Noth-
ing against the plants, they say.
In fact, the first time most of
them saw Scotch broom, they
thought, “What lovely yellow
blooms!” In May, whole sec-
tions of the coast light up — like
someone has swiped the hills
with a yellow highlighter — as
Scotch broom transforms from
a drab shock of branches and
leaves into an attractive, highly
productive flowering shrub.
It is a plant that flourishes in
disturbed soil and quickly dis-
places native plants and trees,
says Nadia Gardner, conserva-
tion manager with the North
Coast Land Conservancy.
Conservationists and water-
shed groups can track its rapa-
cious growth in tangent with
development projects: housing
up in the hills of Seaside, on
recently logged lands, along-
side highways.
Once used to stabilize dunes
and as an ornamental along
highway corridors, the Ore-
gon Department of Agricul-
ture now calls it “one of west-
ern Oregon’s most widespread
and costliest weeds.” The
North Coast Land Conservancy
declares May “broom-buster
month” and organizes exten-
sive efforts to rid their acres of
the weed.
For longtime volunteer Bob
Lundy, Ecola Creek was right
next door. As he entered retire-
ment and began looking for
ways to get more involved in
the community, he figured tear-
ing out Scotch broom was one
small way he could help.
“When I was thinking about
what I was going to do after
retirement, I said I don’t play
golf and I don’t play cards so
I’ll probably have to learn to
fish.” Or surf, he amended. As
it turns out, he said, “Cannon
Beach will find lots of things
for you to do.”
Even as he has become
more involved on boards and
councils and committees, he
continues to help with Scotch
broom removal.“There are
things that need doing. That are
worth doing,” he said.
— Katie Frankowicz
Muslims: ‘He was just telling us that we basically weren’t anything’
Continued from Page 1A
Messages left at the home
of Christian’s mother were not
immediately returned.
The attack occurred on a
light-rail train on the first day
of Ramadan, the holiest time of
the year for Muslims.
Christian was being held on
suspicion of aggravated mur-
der, attempted murder, intimi-
dation and being a felon in pos-
session of a weapon. He was
arrested a short time after the
attack when he was confronted
by other men.
One of the victims of the
hate speech is sending her
thanks to those who came to her
defense, according to KPTV.
Destinee Mangum, 16, told
the station on Saturday that she
and her 17-year-old friend were
riding the train when Jeremy
Christian approached them
yelling what is described as
hate speech. She said her friend
is Muslim, but she’s not.
“He told us to go back to
Saudi Arabia, and he told us
we shouldn’t be here, to get out
of his country,” Mangum said.
“He was just telling us that we
basically weren’t anything and
that we should kill ourselves.”
The girls were scared and
moved to the back of the train
while a stranger jumped in to
help.
“Me and my friend were
going to get off the MAX and
then we turned around while
they were fighting and he just
started stabbing people and it
was just blood everywhere and
we just started running for our
lives,” Mangum said.
Alvin Hall said had just
stepped off the train on Fri-
day when he saw a man bleed-
ing from the neck, KATU-TV
reported. Hall said his instincts
kicked in and he went after the
suspect.
“My first process was,
‘What can I do? Where did he
go?’ and someone said, ‘He ran
over to the bridge,’” Hall said.
“So I just took up running from
the bridge up the stairs.”
He said he met Chase Rob-
inson and Larry Blackwell, and
the three men confronted the
suspect, who turned on them
with a knife.
“The minute he saw me he
started coming after me. He’s
like, ‘You want some of me,
you’re a snitch, come on after
me, you want some of this?’
and started chasing me,” Hall
said.
Soon, police arrived and
took the suspect into custody.
Christian will make his first
court appearance in the case
Tuesday, and it wasn’t clear
if he had an attorney. No one
answered the phone at his Port-
land home.
Police identified the men
killed as Ricky John Best, 53,
of Happy Valley, and Taliesin
Myrddin Namkai Meche, 23, of
Portland. Mayor Ted Wheeler
said Best was a U.S. Army
veteran and a city employee.
Meche earned a bachelor’s
degree in economics in 2016
from Reed College in Portland
and landed a job with the Cad-
mus Group, a consulting firm in
the area.
Police say Micah David-
Cole Fletcher, 21, of Port-
land was also stabbed and is
in serious condition at a Port-
land hospital. Police say his
injuries are not believed to be
life-threatening.
Fletcher is a student at Port-
land State University and was
taking the train from classes
to his job at a pizza shop when
the attack occurred. In 2013,
Fletcher won a poetry compe-
tition, the Verselandia poetry
slam, with a poem condemning
prejudices faced by Muslims,
according to The Oregonian.
Police said one of the two
young women on the train was
wearing a hijab. The assailant
was ranting on many topics,
using “hate speech or biased
language,” police Sgt. Pete
Simpson said.
The FBI said it’s too early to
say whether the slayings qualify
as a federal hate crime. How-
ever, Christian faces intimida-
tion charges, the state equiva-
lent of a hate crime.
The Portland Mercury, one
of the city’s alternative week-
lies, posted an article on its web-
site saying Christian showed up
at a free speech march in late
April with a baseball bat to con-
front protesters and the bat was
confiscated by police.
The article included video
clips of a man wearing a metal
chain around his neck and
draped in an American flag
shouting “I’m a nihilist! This
is my safe place!” as protesters
crowd around him. The Ore-
gonian also had video from
the April 29 march showing
Christian.
Simpson confirmed the man
in the videos was Christian.
On what appears to be
Christian’s Facebook page, he
showed sympathy for Nazis
and Timothy McVeigh, who
bombed a federal building in
Oklahoma City in 1995.