Posted on March 19, 2018 by
Linda Moulton Howe“Something’s Not Right in Southern Oregonâ€
March 19, 2018 Rogue Valley, Oregon – Earthfiles has been receiving worried emails from viewers and listeners who sense that something is significantly wrong in a number of American communities —
ranging from absence of insects and pollinators to missing birds. This morning I received the following email from a man who has lived in southwestern Oregon’s Rogue Valley eleven miles north of Medford for 30 years. What he describes in his email are such striking changes around him that he now wonders if a large seismic event is about to happen and the birds at least know in advance.
“I live on twenty acres on the tip of a mountain that overlooks the entire Rogue Valley. I live among a vast array of wildlife, and I pay particular attention to the avian population.
Normally, the Vultures arrive back in the Rogue Valley around the first week in March, but this year the Vultures started returning the first week in February in small numbers, but it was still significant because I’d never seen that before in the nearly 30 years I’ve lived here.
My hummingbirds are legion and I feed them with up to four large feeders. The Anna Hummingbirds stay all through the winter, while their smaller brethren return from the south arrive about the same time as the Vultures. Not only have the smaller Hummingbirds not returned yet, but all of a sudden, my huge population of Anna Hummingbirds have vanished completely and I haven’t had to fill a single feeder in at least a full week.
But what has really got my attention is the fact the Swallows have not yet returned, and that, more than any other barometer, tells me something is very, very wrong. The Swallows always return the first week of March too, but this is March 18th, and they are nowhere to be seen.
http://www.earthfiles.com/2018/03/19/somethings-not-right-in-southern-oregon/
