Mary Crow leads a hike at Rimrock Ranch for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

When Mary Crow paddles her kayak on Sparks Lake near Sisters, she can hear the water draining into the lava tubes below. Listening to the water gurgle, thinking about the ancient eruptions that formed Central Oregon’s porous landscape, makes her shiver with wonder and delight.

Dave Bone can’t stop talking about the wild wolves he spotted in Yellowstone Park last summer. If he tells you the story more than once — about how the pack jostled and tumbled playfully on a meadow where bison grazed, unperturbed — he should be forgiven. His awe is boundless and unabashed.

Crow and Bone are lifelong naturalists. Only on the land do they feel whole. Harvard’s Howard Gardner, author of the theory of multiple intelligences, believes this bone-deep connection to the earth is innate. He calls it “naturalist intelligence” or “nature smart.” Just as some babies are born with special gifts for music or math, Gardner argues, others come into the world with an exceptional sensitivity to nature.

It is this gift, this abiding passion, that Oregon State University’s Oregon Master Naturalist program (OMN) was designed to embrace and extend. “We are building support for wise stewardship of the environment and deeper understanding of natural resource management,” says Jason O’Brien who coordinates the program for the Oregon State Extension Service. It is one of nearly 40 similar programs around the nation.

Crow and Bone are two of the first 46 participants to complete all 80-plus hours of training for OMN, which began as a pilot effort on the Oregon coast in 2010. An online curriculum gave them an overview of Oregon’s biology, geology and ecology as well as natural resources stewardship and management.  They then met face-to-face with university scientists and other experts for classroom instruction and fieldwork in one of three ecoregions: East Cascades, Oregon coast and Willamette Valley. (Additional ecoregions will be brought into the program pending demand.)

Instruction spanned every perspective: macro to micro, flora and fauna, volcanic and tectonic forces shaping the landscape. One Saturday, the coastal participants met on the headlands at Cape Perpetua. There, Bob Lillie, an emeritus professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, told them about geological phenomena like tsunamis and plate tectonics. Another time, the class convened at the Tillamook State Forest, where Frank Burris, an Extension watershed educator, and Glenn Ahrens, an Extension forester, delved into watersheds and riparian zones. Jamie Doyle, an educator with Sea Grant Extension, taught a class on Pacific Ocean fisheries and marine protected areas.

What the graduates do with their expertise looks different from place to place, person to person. One person might collect data as a citizen scientist, counting dead seabirds for COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team), for instance, or monitoring water quality for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Another person might be a guide, leading interpretive hikes for the Deschutes Land Trust. A third might opt for hands-on stewardship, planting aspen seedlings or building beaver barriers for a local watershed council. People who are less physically active might greet visitors at an interpretive center or use their skills behind the scenes designing brochures, editing newsletters or updating websites.

Hooking into an existing organization — either a natural resources agency or an environmental nonprofit — is the common denominator for all Master Naturalists, who must volunteer at least 40 hours yearly to keep their certification.

“The program leverages the time and talents of highly capable volunteers,” notes O’Brien, whose degrees are in wildlife biology and natural resources interpretation, and who is himself a fervent naturalist. “It can be a huge help to private and public organizations, especially in times of tight budgets or when professional staff can’t accomplish all the services they’re mandated to provide. It’s an embodiment of the land grant mission — serving the needs of the public.”

At Lake of the Woods in Southern Oregon, Master Naturalist Dave Bone shares his love of wildlife with young campers. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

MEDFORD – One evening when he was 8, Dave Bone’s mom bundled him up against the cold, set him on a wooden sled and told him to hang on tight. Then, leaning into the night, she pulled the sled through the snowy streets of Greene, Iowa. At City Hall on 2nd Street, she brought the sled to a stop and took her son by the hand.

Unbeknownst to him, little Dave was about to become a member of Cub Scout Pack 26, which was meeting on the second floor of the old brick building. “This looks like fun,” he remembers thinking when he walked in and saw the cluster of boys in their blue-and-yellow uniforms.

Beverly Bone couldn’t have imagined that 55 years later and 2,000 miles away, her son still would be scouting. That fateful sled ride launched him on a lifetime of outdoor exploration, service and education. This Eagle Scout’s recent segue into Oregon Master Naturalists was just a logical extension of what he’s been doing for a half-century.

Animal Planet

One mist-gray morning in Southern Oregon, Bone is striding along the shore at Lake of the Woods when a flash of white catches his eye. “Bald eagle!” he calls out, pointing toward a reedy promontory. He quickly sets up his spotting scope as the bird unfolds its massive wings and lifts off, disappearing into the dense forest that hems the lake. “Hot dog!” he exclaims. Then, again, quietly to himself, “Hot dog.”

His excited reaction might suggest that this was his first eagle sighting. But Bone — a retired schoolteacher who taught science in the logging community of Butte Falls — has seen hundreds of eagles, “clouds” of snow geese and countless other raptors and waterfowl while tramping the mountains, valleys and wetlands near his Medford home.

While he loves birds, he’s an equal-opportunity wildlife enthusiast. Beavers, yellow-bellied marmots, flying squirrels — even the tiniest chipmunk and lowliest skunk — stir his sense of wonder even after many years as a Boy Scout camp administrator and, more recently, a volunteer at Camp McLoughlin on Lake of the Woods. Not content to stay inland, Bone also serves as a site captain and interpreter for Whale Watching Spoken Here (a program of the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation) and as education chair for Shoreline Education for Awareness (a “friends group” of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

“Scenery is fantastic, but it’s the wildlife that makes it come alive,” he says. To emphasize his point, he reaches into the pocket of his rain pants and pulls out a clump of folded bills bound by a silver money clip, a gift from his wife, Bea. He reads aloud the inscription, a quote from the 1972 ecology movie Home. “If all the animals were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of spirit.”

The Wow Factor

Sharing nature has been his calling ever since earning his master’s in outdoor education at Southern Oregon University after he moved west with his bride, a native Oregonian. “The three key words in the mission of Oregon Master Naturalists are explore, connect, contribute,” he says. “Those are the same concepts I work with in the Boy Scouts. Taking people outdoors, guiding discovery, encouraging conservation — that’s what both programs are all about.”

For him, it all comes together in the astonished gasp of a wide-eyed child.  “I call it the ‘wow factor,’” he says. “It warms the cockles of my heart.”

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See more stories from the Corps of Discovery.

Oregon State University master naturalist volunteers Anne Marie Farell-Matthews and Philip Matthews cut open sacks of native Olympia oysters and spread them on a muddy flat at Oregon's South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve near Charleston. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

COOS BAY – Lots of people fantasize about appearing on American Idol or Wheel of Fortune. But Oregon Field Guide? Not so much — that is, unless you happen to be Anne Farrell-Matthews and Philip Matthews. Whether they’re heaving bags of oysters around a sandbar or hauling groundwater monitors across a salt marsh, this pair of Oregon Master Naturalists could easily imagine OPB TV host Steve Amen showing up with a video crew. For the Coos Bay couple, joining in on ecosystem science and restoration is that glamorous.

So how is it that this hip couple in their 40s gets all excited about red tree voles, beaver scat and shimmy worms? Why would a general contractor and a graphic designer get up at 5 a.m. to wade around in the muck trying to save native oysters? Why would a pair of avid surfers forego great waves to study physical oceanography and the Cascadia Subduction Zone late into the night?

Partly because the South Slough runs through their veins. Philip tramped these mudflats and salt marshes relentlessly as a kid, his Irish setter Britta beside him. Anne came to Coos Bay later, at 19, from landlocked Denver where her bedroom walls had been plastered with whale posters. Finally, she felt like she could breathe. Together, they’ve explored every twist and tangle of the slough, which became the nation’s first national estuarine research reserve in the 1970s.

The other answer is more cerebral. It has to do with making amends and taking ownership. It has to do with helping to heal the landscape they love, a landscape that has been stressed by overharvesting, pollution and population growth over the past century and a half.

Philip’s motives are particularly personal. “I’m half French, half redneck,” he likes to joke. Describing his mom’s family, the French side of the clan, as “extreme environmentalists,” he hammers home his point by saying, “My uncle once chained himself to City Hall to protect shorebirds from hunters.” It’s his dad’s side for which he’s now making atonement. “My dad came from people who took advantage of the environment — poaching, fishing for salmon with dynamite, some pretty serious abuses of nature,” he explains. “I want to help offset some of the negative stuff.”

Turning the Tide

One August morning just as the sun is displacing the moon, Philip and Anne are skimming across the slough in a skiff with a team of scientists, students and volunteers, all Velcroed into brown neoprene chest waders and slip-proof boots. They set anchor at a spit called Younker Point. Footprints of shorebirds trace trails in the wet sand as the team, working fast against the tide, digs up bundle after bundle of oysters for transfer to a new location as part of a NOAA-funded project led by the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. Restoring native Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) to the slough is the project’s long-term goal, and preliminary findings show that the oysters, transplanted from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, could survive and grow. But over time, excessive siltation turned out to be a problem at Younker Point, explains Dave Landkamer, an aquaculturist with Oregon Sea Grant, who’s helping with the oyster transfer.

“They’ve been suffocated in silt,” Landkamer says. “You can see by the ripples in the wet sand that there’s too much wave and tidal energy here for good oyster habitat. “
That’s why, after wrestling the mesh bags from the sand’s sucking grip, the team slings them into the skiff and another small boat for relocation. The morning sun is just cresting the treetops as the team speeds toward Long Island Point, a place where ancient shell middens are evidence of long-ago oyster beds. Alongshore, white egrets and blue herons stalk their prey. Cormorants circle overhead. Gulls cry out. A bald eagle rises from the pinnacle of a fir.

Out at the point, the team hurriedly stacks the bags to create a reef of oyster shells in hopes that the “Olys” will settle and spawn. This is just an early stage of longer-term studies. The National Estuarine Research Reserve Science Collaborative, which brings local stakeholders into its research process, is funding the next phase of the investigation. Someday, native oysters may once again be abundant in the South Slough.

Natural Mastery

As the team disembarks back at Charleston Bay’s boat basin, Philip’s face is smudged with mud. Anne is wet to the skin from the saltwater that “topped over” her waders. So it’s more than a little incongruous that their expressions fall somewhere between serenity and ecstasy. Clearly, getting sweaty, soggy and dirty is exactly what they signed up for when they chose to become Oregon Master Naturalists.

“I’m cold and I’m muddy,” Anne says with a huge grin. “And I had a great time!”

Then she adds reflectively: “Estuaries are the nurseries of the planet. If I can contribute in some tiny way to keeping them healthy, that’s what I want to do. After all, this is our own backyard.”

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Read more about Oregon Master Naturalists in Corps of Discovery.

Hikers tour Rimrock Ranch, which has been placed in a conservation easement for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

SISTERS – A group of hikers stands on the rim of Whychus Canyon, a steep V gouging the rangeland. The canyon’s exposed layers reveal 5 million years of geologic history. Far below, Whychus Creek glints among aspen and cottonwood whose leaves have turned the color of butter. Black Butte and Mt. Jefferson command the western horizon.

On this bright October day at Rimrock Ranch — where Red Anguses ruminate contentedly, saddle horses graze peacefully, and the breeze is as benign as a baby’s breath — guide Mary Crow is telling a story about the natural history of this protected place when someone calls, “Look!” Every face turns just as a golden eagle comes into view, soaring on wings as wide as a human is tall. Riding a thermal along the rimrock, its shadow skimming the yellow rock face, the bird is so close the hikers can almost touch it.

Trek Through Time

The eagle’s passage sets the tone for the next four hours — a magical trek into a landscape forged over eons by eruptions and floods, altered by early settlers and 20th-century engineers, and now being restored to ecosystem health by the Deschutes Land Trust, which is sponsoring the hike.

Guiding tours for the Land Trust has been, for years, an outgrowth of Crow’s passion for the land. As a lifelong adventurer in the East Cascades ecoregion, she has been getting to know these mountains, rivers and rangelands as she hikes, skis and kayaks. So when she heard about Oregon State’s new Master Naturalist program, this self-described “wannabe scientist” jumped at the opportunity.

“I always felt I had gaps in my knowledge,” says Crow, a retired librarian and former technician at Intel in Hillsboro. “Now, with the Master Naturalist program, I feel like I’m able to give more to the participants in my tours.”

As she leads the hikers — mostly retired professionals including a school superintendent, a geophysicist and a university professor — she points out the wind-sculpted rock towers called hoodoos that jut upward from the canyon walls. She talks about the Deschutes Formation, layers of sedimentary and volcanic deposits laid down between the Miocene and Pliocene, upon which Rimrock Ranch’s 1,100 acres sit. The Land Trust, she says, is removing juniper (which sucks up tons of water) and restoring Ponderosa pine (which smells like a caramel latte if you get close enough to sniff the bark). Native grasses are coming back as local “weed warriors” eradicate invasive plants.

At the bottom of the canyon, the hikers contemplate the creek that once ran thick with steelhead. Someday, Crow tells them, Chinook salmon and steelhead will once again swim and spawn in the Whychus, a Deschutes River tributary originating in the Three Sisters Wilderness and channelized in the 1960s to control flooding. It will reclaim its meandering path through the meadow as part of the Land Trust’s agreement with landowners Bob and Gayle Baker, who have put the ranch into a conservation easement for perpetual protection.

The sun slips past its zenith, and the group loops back toward the trailhead. Crow takes a whiskbroom from the backseat of her all-wheel-drive Toyota and shows the hikers how to brush their boots before heading home. It’s not dust she’s worried about. It’s invasive seed heads. “We don’t want these ending up over at the Metolius River,” she explains.

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Read more stories about Oregon Master Naturalists in the Corps of Discovery.

Voracious red-ranger chickens cleaned out the bugs from this leaf litter, says Betsey Miller (Photo: Julia Rosen)

“Aw, no bugs!” exclaims Betsey Miller after meticulously pouring over a wheelbarrow’s worth of decomposing leaf litter and manure. “The chickens are doing a great job, but it’s still fun for us entomologists to find insects once in a while!”

A pen of praiseworthy red-ranger chickens peck away at the grass a few yards away, devouring beetles, larvae and weeds with single-minded perseverance. Their fiery plumage stands out against an emerald backdrop of spring foliage, like a premonition of rosy fruit to come.

Miller and her colleagues at Oregon State University (Extension and Department of Horticulture) brought the pest-seeking fowl to La Mancha’s Brooklane Organic Apple Orchard in Corvallis to conduct a pilot study on the use of free-range poultry for biodynamic pest control. Here, the birds move through the leafy rows of apple trees inside open-air enclosures known as “chicken tractors,” mowing down unwanted vegetation with the efficiency of weed whackers, hunting every apple maggot out of its earthen den and growing into succulent, free-range broilers in the process.

Poultry vs pests

The agricultural mentality of the central Willamette Valley, with its patchwork of small organic farms, vineyards and burgeoning local meat scene, makes it an ideal place to test out such an unconventional approach. While commercial apple growers rely heavily on the application of pesticides and herbicides to control orchard conditions, organic growers have limited options. Says Miller, “we are trying to find a way to manage insects that is more affordable and less labor intensive for these farmers.” To achieve this goal, they designed the first experiment in the state to use outdoor chickens, putting them to use in a synergistic approach to small-scale agriculture. Asked how this unusual project got off the ground in the first place, Miller says, “people here want to see agriculture go in a different direction.”

Scorched Earth, chicken style. (Photo: Julia Rosen)

The collaboration between a small poultry operation and an apple grower is a case in point. Travis Witmer of TnT Farms in Philomath handles the 150 birds at Brooklane. He explains, “I could never raise this many birds on my small plot of land. I do have to drive out here every day, but other than that, the workload and the costs are the same.” Miller and Witmer hope that this pilot study may serve as inspiration for other local chicken farmers to rent out their birds to orchards with pest problems — the same way a plumber offers his services to fix a clogged drain. So far, the results look promising.

As with most agricultural endeavors, the key to success lies in perfect timing. “To comply with organic standards,” explains Miller, “Brooklane cannot apply manure within 90 days of harvest.” Since chickens are veritable fertilizer factories, this means they have to be off the premises — and hitting the farmer’s market — by June. Witmer put the chicks out in mid-March, the perfect time to start raising broilers before the summer heat sets in, and one of the most critical times for apple pest control. Overwintering maggots start to stir in the soil as the winter chill retreats. This year, however, they will awake to a much more hostile orchard than the one their progenitors knew the previous fall.

But how does Miller know if the birds can hold up their end of the bargain? Miller plans to conduct vegetation surveys before and after the birds pass through an area to quantify their ability to control weeds. However, all you need to see their success is a pair of eyes. The spots where the tractors stood for a day or two have literally been grazed down to bare soil and remain that way for weeks. Weeds harbor harmful insects and compete with fruit trees for nutrients, but suppressing their growth requires labor-intensive mowing or the application of herbicides. Or, as it turns out, a dozen roving bands of ravenous red rangers.

No ordinary chickens

To determine how well the chickens manage insect populations, Miller and colleagues have come up with a clever plan. They add several hundred benign pest lookalikes to a heaping pile of leaf litter and put it inside the chickens’ pen. Only 24 hours later, they sift through the remains and count the survivors. In control studies where the litter sits out overnight but never sees the voracious fowl, they recover 99% of the decoys they plant. However today, after a night inside the pen marked by a blaze of orange polka dot ribbon, the researchers can’t find a single bug in this heap of fragrant humus.

Red rangers mean business (Photo: Julia Rosen)

The staggering efficiency of these birds stems from the fact that they are no ordinary Cornish Crosses, the most common breed of broiler chickens. “You could leave a Cornish Cross out here for a week and it would just wait by its trough for you to bring more feed,” laughs Witmer. Red rangers, on the other hand, were bred to hunt. Descendents of the original foraging bird, the aptly-named freedom ranger, red rangers leave no leaf unturned during the 12 weeks it takes them to mature. Plus, boasts Witmer, the rangers recently won an informal blind taste test among pastured poultry farmers in the Willamette Valley by a unanimous vote. Not bad for a working bird!

However, many questions remain. Will the birds eat beneficial insects too? Will researchers be able to detect decreases in deleterious coddling moth populations? And will the laying hens they put out in the autumn help further drive down pest problems?

It’s too early to say, but Miller is hopeful. “Our goal for this year is to work out the kinks so that we can do bigger projects in the future.” This might include splitting the orchard in half, with chickens working a wide swath of trees instead of the few rows they tackled this year. Or monitoring apple yields and the percent of damaged fruit from year to year now that the chickens are on the prowl. With more solid data under their belts, Miller and Witmer hope to share their findings with farmers through Extension, at small-farm conferences and with apple growers’ groups.

In any case, they plan to keep at it. “What motivates me,” explains Miller, as she looks up from a sieve full of decomposing detritus, “is to find elegant solutions that persist through time.” As the birds dive into a new batch of bug-filled compost, they demonstrate the point she makes next: “We just have to set this machine in motion and stand back.”

The future of organic apple production? (Photo: Julia Rosen)

Illustration by Teresa Hall

It may sound like the Olympics, but you don’t have to go to extremes to get benefits that could last a lifetime. Regular exercises can raise or maintain bone mass in children and adults, reducing fracture risks as they age.

Those are the conclusions of studies by Kathy Gunter and her team of undergraduate and graduate students in the OSU Extension Service and Dept. of Nutrition and Exercise Sciences. Here are a few numbers to remember.

15 minutes
Three times a week for an entire school year, more than 300 elementary school-aged children spent part of their physical education period jumping 100 times off a two-foot high platform. Four to seven years after the exercises stopped, jumpers had three to eight percent more bone mass in their hips, compared to control groups. The project known as BUGSY (BUilding the Growing Skeleton in Youth) was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

31 runners
In a recent study by Gunter, pre-adolescent girls had higher bone mineral content in their hips after participating in Girls on the Run for at least three months. The international self-esteem program may promote bone health that lasts well into adulthood. Gunter is following up on the positive association between running and bone mass in girls.

75 instructors
Better Bones and Balance is for older adults. Gunter and former OSU professor Christine Snow demonstrated that weight-bearing physical activity can reduce the risk of osteoporotic fractures in older women. Gunter has trained instructors to deliver the program in communities throughout Oregon, Washington and California. Data show that participants have greater bone mass, reduced fall risk and better functional capacity than those in control groups.

Strapped into a small holding device, the honeybee amiably wiggles its antennae. Like a toddler in a highchair, it seems to reach greedily for the dropper with sugar water that appears over its head. As its mouth opens, its tongue darts out for a taste of the sweet liquid.

As part of Ramesh Sagili's experiments to understand honeybee behavior, bees wait in this feeding tube to receive sugar solutions. (Photo courtesy of Ramesh Sagili)

This isn’t just a strange way to treat a honeybee to lunch. It’s all part of Ramesh Sagili’s effort to understand honeybee behavior, and in particular, the reason for their sudden disappearance. Since the emergence of Colony Collapse Disorder in 2006, entire hives of honeybees have been dying with no obvious explanation.

Honeybee decline could seriously damage agricultural crops across the nation. Take the $2 billion California almond industry, which depends heavily on domestic honeybees to pollinate almond crops. Every February, 1.5 million honeybee hives are trucked from all over the country to pollinate the thousands of acres of almonds.

“Without honeybees, there is no almond crop in California,” says Sagili, an assistant professor in horticulture and the OSU Extension honeybee specialist. “In the U.S., it would be highly improbable to rely on hand pollination because the work is so expensive and labor intensive. These plants have coevolved with bees, and the bees do a much more efficient job than humans.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, honeybees pollinate 90 percent of the country’s apple and blueberry crops and are partially responsible for pollinating oranges and peaches. In fact, honeybees play a part in pollinating at least 130 U.S. crops. Since about one-third of our food depends on bees for pollination, a decline in honeybee hives would be disastrous.

Vanishing Act

And yet, that’s exactly what is happening. In late 2006, honeybees began to vanish from their hives at unprecedented and inexplicable rates. Beekeepers around the country were mystified when they opened their bee boxes, finding all the adult bees missing and only the queen and larvae remaining. Even stranger was that the absent bees were nowhere to be found, dead or alive. They were simply gone.

Researchers were hard-pressed to explain this phenomenon. Colony numbers were dropping 30 to 60 percent in some areas of the country, and the future of a $20 billion industry was at stake. That was four years ago, and scientists are still searching for a solution to the mystery.

When Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) first gained attention, Sagili was working at Texas A&M University. At the time, researchers were not focusing on honeybee sustainability. “Because we weren’t seeing big losses, we were trying to increase colony productivity for the farmers,” Sagili says.

As CCD hit, Sagili realized that he needed to shift gears and focus on honeybee health. Oregon State University hired him in 2009 to work with Oregon beekeepers and to study colony health and vitality.

“I had to change direction completely,” Sagili adds, referring to his new studies that revolve primarily around diagnosing what is wrong with the bees.

At OSU, Sagili is the Sherlock Holmes of honeybees. He searches for clues in the insects themselves, collecting honeybees from around the state. He keeps in touch with about 25 of the state’s commercial beekeepers through email or conferences. Twice a year, he and his colleagues at the OSU Honey Bee Lab examine the collected bees for levels of mite infestation, fungal spores and protein content in food-producing glands.

The first two categories seem relatively straightforward. It makes sense that mites, Nosema (a type of fungus) spores or other parasites would harm bee health and make them less successful. But glandular protein content is particularly important because it deals with nutrition, and as Sagili says, “Everything boils down to nutrition.”

Stress in the Orchard

Modern agriculture may put stresses on honeybees that they don’t face in nature. For example, almond trees in California are practically the only plants blooming in February when bees are trucked in for pollination. Consequently, the bees acquire little but almond pollen for an entire month.

Ramesh Sagili, Oregon State University entomologist, is investigating bee nutrition (Photo: Lynn Ketchum).

That’s a problem, says Sagili, because just like humans, bees require a balanced diet. Some amino acids, the building blocks of protein, must come from food; neither people nor bees synthesize all the ones they need. Bees need 10 amino acids in their diet for full development, and since their only protein source is pollen, collecting a variety of pollens is crucial to proper nutrition.

Bees eating only almond pollen are like people living only on French fries. A diet composed of single source pollen does not provide enough nutrients, and, suggests Sagili, may weaken the bees’ immune system.

Poor immune systems leave honeybees greatly susceptible to parasites and disease. While these threats are nothing new, unhealthy and nutritionally deficient bees could be falling prey to old pests as their defenses are being drained.

That’s why Sagili is interested in finding a connection between bee protein and immune systems. Poor nutrition might help to explain why bees are disappearing. The other pressures on bees — parasites, viruses and pesticides — are potential contributing factors, and CCD may be the ultimate result of all of them.

Taste Test

Sagili is performing experiments to narrow down the possibilities. In one, he places bees in a “containment tube” and offers them different concentrations of a sugar solution. This taste test, with the bees waiting patiently and wriggling their antennae in anticipation, allows Sagili to learn more about their ability to detect sugar concentrations. Because worker bees have specialized jobs in the hive, some can detect higher concentrations better than others. It’s possible that nutritional stress may affect important foraging behavior of honeybees.

“Once we gather some good information from the past two years, we can see if there’s a correlation between survival status of the hive and all the problems that we found in the hives, such as protein content,” Sagili says.

Meanwhile, as Sagili and other scientists learn more about honeybees and their behavior, the number of hives continues to dwindle, from about 5 million in 1950 to 2.4 million in 2010. If Sagili is right and nutrition is the most significant problem, then beekeepers, farmers and orchard managers may be able to reverse that trend by ensuring that their pollinators are well fed.

Viviane Simon-Brown leads a national Extension network to promote sustainable living.

Viviane Simon-Brown works in a typical office, types away on her computer and networks with colleagues across the country. Not exactly the Earth Mother image. However, the energetic, silver-haired professor of forest resources and Oregon State University Extension Forestry may just be the thoroughly modern version. Inspired by environmental trends and by a 1997, Rotary-funded trip to study community development in India, she has created a national program that emphasizes personal values in sustainability education.

In the Indian state of Kerala, Simon-Brown found a society with an acclaimed health-care system, an exceptionally high rate of education and one of the country’s most effective economic development programs. On top of those signs of success, she found that the average salary was the equivalent of $300 per year. Despite their apparent lack of money, she says, citizens in Kerala are wealthy in many ways. “If money isn’t the answer, then what is?” she wondered.

Simon-Brown had taught programs for community leaders and natural resources professionals, helped to start the High Desert Museum in Bend and led wilderness trips down whitewater rivers. After going to India, she assembled a team and started a national dialogue on sustainable living (a term that she coined). Today, Extension’s National Network for Sustainable Living Education has grown from her work. Starting with 12 colleagues in five states in 2004, it now has more than 80 people at 30 land grant universities. It has also inspired sustainability education efforts in Extension’s 4-H programs for youth.

The emphasis, she says, is on ethics in action, on clarified values that lead to small, simple steps: planting a vegetable garden, driving less by living closer to work, creating a video about kindness, making purchases with a “smart shopping” approach. Simon-Brown created an “Unshopping Card” that reminds us to consider the practical (Can it be recycled? Can it be fixed?) and ethical (Is it “fair trade?” Is it worth the time I worked to pay for it?) aspects of the things we buy.

“We’ve really messed our nest,” she says. “If we don’t turn this around, our kids and our kids’ kids are going to see a world terribly diminished. But it’s too late to be a pessimist. We better get in there and do something.”

Simon-Brown credits Scott Reed, vice provost for University Outreach and Engagement, for supporting her initial efforts in sustainability education. And she regards Alice Elshoff — a friend, science teacher and volunteer at the High Desert Museum — for inspiring her to live life fully. “Alice is an activist. She walks her talk. She gets up in the morning and sings. She’s a marvelous human being,” says Simon-Brown. “I want to be like her when I grow up.”

Ramesh Sagili will work with Oregon farmers whose crops depend on bee pollination. In his research, Sagili will study pheromones, chemicals that affect animal behavior.

Ramesh Sagili arrived in Corvallis in February to start a honeybee research program targeting mites, pesticides, stress and nutrition. The new OSU bee specialist is part of an initiative to help ensure that there are enough healthy honeybees to pollinate Oregon’s crops.

Sagili says Varroa mites, nutritional deficiencies or other factors might be the cause of colony collapse disorder, which occurs when adult honeybees abandon a hive. Sagili’s position was created at the request of Oregon agricultural groups worried about the health and supply of honeybees, which are crucial pollinators for many of the state’s crops, including blueberries, pears, cherries, apples and vegetable seeds.

“Colony collapse disorder is so complex that it will be a long time before we arrive at a conclusion as to what is causing it,” Sagili adds. “But meanwhile, beekeepers need to take steps to maintain healthy and strong colonies.”

For more information:

OSU Hires Texas A&M Entomologist to Study Honeybee Health, 2-4-09

To support honeybee research at OSU, contact the OSU Foundation

A day after his high-school graduation, Rob Golembiewski landed a summer job experimenting with turf grass at Michigan State University. The self-confessed perfectionist says he still loves to work in his yard. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Rob Golembiewski wears a size-13 shoe, but that’s nothing compared with the shoes he has to fill. The former head of the golf and turf management program at the University of Minnesota’s Crookston campus has replaced Tom Cook as the director of Oregon State University’s turf management program.

Thirty-one years ago, the hardworking and revered Cook, who retired this fall, single-handedly created the program, which has produced superintendents at prominent golf courses, including Pebble Beach and Bandon Dunes.

“It’s phenomenal what Tom did as a one-man show. I have an appreciation for what he built. I’ll be very protective of it, and I look forward to taking it to the next level,” says Golembiewski, who launched the golf and turf program at Montana State University and co-owned a landscaping company for six years in Arizona.

He has wasted no time getting down to work. He clocks at least 12 hours a day teaching, picking the brains of industry professionals over lunch and speaking at conferences. On weekends, he’s at his office, which he painted himself – a luminous Beaver orange. (“It was a little brighter than I expected,” he confesses.)

Right now, he’s deciding what research projects to take on.

“I’ve been visiting with turf breeders, golf course superintendents and landscapers trying to get feedback about what the Pacific Northwest industry sees as key issues,” he adds. “I want to do research that impacts the Northwest and the nation.”

He plans to continue the program’s research on perennial ryegrass, the fertility of annual bluegrass and the performance of certain grass mixtures in shaded conditions. The research is conducted on five acres of experimental plots and putting greens at OSU’s Lewis-Brown Farm. Golembiewski intends to expand the putting green area there by up to 10,000 square feet.

He’s also looking to enhance what takes place inside the classroom. In December, he met with a committee of industry representatives to hear its thoughts on how graduates of the program have performed at the representatives’ companies and how the curriculum stacks up to others.

Unlike Cook, though, Golembiewski doesn’t have to scramble to gather grants and donations to fund his employment during the summer. Earlier this year, the family of the late OSU alumnus Nat Giustina announced that it had donated $1 million to endow a professorship for Cook’s replacement.

Golembiewski’s endowment is a far cry from his first paid job in the business. That was back when he was a teenager taking care of a neighbor’s immaculate yard.

“They loved me because I was meticulous,” says Golembiewski, 39, the second youngest of 11 children. When it comes to his own yard, the Michigan native describes himself as a perfectionist. “I mow straight lines and pick up every leaf,” he says. “I love to work in the yard.”