Field Journal: Dragonflies and Helicopter Rides
Ed Jahn, Producer
Monday, October 23, 2006 — Summertime for the Field Guide crew often means lots of time on the road shooting stories for the new season. It also means long days, hot weather and the chance to be working outside where, quite frankly, I'd rather be any day, winter or summer. Back in July, I took combo trip to Eugene and Bandon with photographer Nick Fisher. We travel a lot together and the routine goes like this — take turns driving, drinking red bull, rifling through each other's CD collections ( or listening to talk radio), yakking about the day's politics, then drinking more red bull, coffee, followed by napping. Works for us.
So we left on a Monday morning to go see a couple of really neat, dedicated odenatists. Odenatists are dragonfly enthusiasts and we had the privilege of joining two great "Eugenites", Cary Kerst and Steve Gordon, who jointly published a fantastic field guide to Dragonflies of the Willamette valley. So we mucked through the West Eugene wetlands where, in a matter of a few hot, sunny hours, we saw over 20 species of dragonflies. The powerful, sweet smell of the cottonwoods lining the pond banks lingered everywhere we went‚ oddly reminiscent of the dumptruck load of mixed mulch I had dumped on my yard recently. Anyway, it wasn't hard to be fascinated by these gemlike creatures when you have guys like Steve and Cary around. Did you know dragonflies have been around since before birds? Evolution never ceases to amaze.
About 4pm I get a call from a guy at the Oregon Department of Agriculture saying that if we wanted to join a helicopter survey looking for "sudden oak death" we'd better hustle on down to Bandon right away. We've been waiting for this last element of our Sudden Oak Death story for several months, so we were glad for the invitation. Even so, we were less than enthused after spending 9 hours in the sun to have to get back in the van and head 3 more hours to Bandon. More coffee and tea. Yet I still slept well that night.
By Tuesday morning at 8:00 am we were in Bandon and on board for the Helicopter survey. Nothing much more to say here than it's always great to get a chance to ride in a helicopter. It's one of the best ways to see a lot of great Oregon country, even if, as in our case, we were looking for dead trees. Sudden Oak Death is a GRAVE THREAT to ecosystems throughout Oregon but especially to the Tanoak forests of southern Oregon. This is one of those stories we do that I hope will truly heighten awareness of a very serious issue, and provoke people to support the incredible work of people from the federal government, communities, nurseries, state government and contractors who are doing their best to eradicate this wicked forest killer.
