Round Up of Eerie Events on Oregon Coast: New TR Column at BoA

Yachats, Oregon, photo by Regan Lee 2010

My latest Trickster's Realm column is up at Tim Binnall's BoA: Round Up of Eerie Events on Oregon Coast. Some of those eerie events include animals:

Tillamook
A November 6th item in local news: Oregon crabbers in the Tillamook area are facing a dangerous season, more so than the usual: Dangerous crab season puts rescuers on alert  . . .  the crabbers in the Tillamook area, fishermen know of the dangers and that's not news, but the danger has been escalating:

We've lost a lot of boats," said Mike Saindon, master chief petty officer in Garibaldi. "It is a very dangerous place and it has been for awhile. Conditions are bad and they have been getting worse over the years. No one knows why that's happening."

Pink Sea Stars 

Hundreds of star fish -- "sea stars," more correctly -- have washed up on an Oregon beaches and scientists don't know why. Heceta Beach, well known to myself, since I live roughly fifty miles from there and visit that area frequently, witnessed the mysterious die off of sea stars this past Thursday. So far, no other Oregon beaches have reported mass beachings of sea stars; just Heceta Beach:

"We found it very curious," said Justin Ainsworth, shellfish biologist with the wildlife agency. "We haven't had any calls like this in my time here. We contacted past biologists from this office and they couldn't recall anything like it in the past 30 years."

Even more curious was the fact that, after they made calls to the coastal wildlife offices in Astoria and Coos Bay, they realized that Heceta Beach seemed to be the only place where the phenomenon occurred.

Infected Sea Lions

Sick, dying and dead sea lions are coming ashore along the Oregon coast. Rise in sea lion deaths traced to disease. The sea lions are thought to have leptospirosis. There are warnings to avoid wet sand, and to not touch the sea lions, dead or alive (which is a given anyway, one would think) as leptospirosis can be transmitted to humans.

You can read the entire article on Binnall of America.