CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP) — Early in College Hill High School teacher Cherie Taylor’s horticulture class, she went to her car to retrieve the 11 half-grown chickens she had brought for students to care for during the class, only to find that the chickens had broken free from the cardboard box in which she transported them.

Further, the escaped chickens had made a prodigious mess on the outside of their box and in the car, so instead of having one student carry the box as she planned, Taylor had her students each individually carry the chickens to the school’s fenced garden area.

So lesson one for Tuesday: Chickens — bad for cars, but good for gardens.

Taylor’s horticulture class has been caring for the chickens since the start of the school year, when they were just 3 days old. Taylor said introducing the chickens is part of the course’s rotating topics, which allow students to take the school’s only science class over multiple years and not have to repeat content. In past years they’ve studied mycorrhizal fungi and bees.

Taylor said lessons with the chickens for the horticulture class, which has become so popular that this year she had to add a second section, have included how to care for the chickens and the benefits chickens have on a garden, such as fertilization and pest control.

Her construction math class, new this year at the school, is also building prototype coops that are designed to fit over the garden’s raised beds, so the chickens can be rotated between the beds, although right now Taylor keeps them at her house when they are not attending class. The construction math class is trying to get to a point where it can sell coops as a fundraiser.

Taylor said hands-on activities, like raising chickens, are more engaging to students.

“I could lecture from a textbook and kids would be looking at the clock,” she said.

But in horticulture, students like Isaac Smartt said they enjoy the class so much that they come in during their free time to work on the garden.

Smartt, a senior at the alternative school, said he saw what other students were doing in the class last year so he wanted to join it.

“I’ve learned way more with hands-on (lessons) than I have with books,” he said.

Smartt, who is also in the construction math class and has worked outside of class on building a coop for the chickens, said he helps out with his dad’s garden at home and he’d like to get his own chickens.

“It’s been great because I’ve watched these chickens grow since they could fit in my hand. Now I’m building them a home. It feels good,” he said.

Ethan Sauret, a junior in his second year in horticulture classes, said having the chickens added new depth to the class. During Tuesday’s class he spent his time looking after the chickens as they wandered the garden. He paid particular attention to what they were eating, so that the students can understand how to feed them as they transition off chicken feed.

“A lot of people would learn better if there were more classes like this in school. It lets you see how things work,” he said.

Cindy Preece, an administrative assistant at the school, recalled taking photos of the first days of class, when students were caring for the chicks.

“What I saw happening was this utter calm come over the room,” she said of the chicks coming into the class for the first time. She said the students were excited and engaged as they cared for the chickens.

“It was this incredible experience of watching kids blossom and feel confident right before my eyes,” she said.

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — An 8-year-old Yorkshire Terrier was carried away from its owner’s porch in Oregon by an animal believed to be a young cougar.

The Statesman Journal reports that Mark Jensen says he watched a large cat carry away his dog, Bub, at his house near Sublimity early Wednesday morning.

He told Marion County Sheriff’s deputies that the animal cornered the Yorkie on the porch before carrying it away.

Jensen describes the cat as weighing between 35 and 50 pounds with brown and white markings.

The Marion County Sheriff’s Office, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Oregon State Police are determining the appropriate response.

Tillamook, Ore. — The cows at the Averill family’s dairy seem unimpressed by the high-tech gadgetry surrounding them.

They calmly pass through an automated gate that sorts the cows based on how recently they’ve been milked, which is monitored using radio-frequency identification devices on their ears.

Those who have been milked too recently are returned to their stalls, while those who are ready to be milked are ushered toward one of six robotic milkers.

After waiting their turn in line, each cow steps into a pen and enjoys some grain while the giant robotic arm does its business.

To many, this scenario represents the future of farming. As labor costs increase and the labor pool shrinks, farmers such as the Averills are turning to robotics and other technology to provide better care for their animals and increase efficiency.

Adoption of robotic systems has been growing at about 25 percent a year, and has particularly “taken off” during past decade, said Larry Tranel, an extension dairy specialist at Iowa State University who has studied the economics of automation.

“We don’t see it slowing down,” he said.

At the Averills’ dairy, the robot first sprays the entire udder with an iodine formula, then washes and dries each teat before attaching suction cups to harvest the milk. Each robot can handle 60 cows.

Once the task is complete, the cow is again set loose among its peers, free to enjoy a comforting session with the robotic touch-activated spinning brushes that clean off manure and remove loose hair.

Occasionally, the cows indifferently step over the mechanical manure scraper that slowly and continuously cleans the barn alleys. They are fed by an automated feed pusher that maintains their rations in orderly rows.

“They adapt quite well to technology. Probably easier than people,” said Mark Brown, a general manager for DeLaval Dairy Service, which builds and installs the equipment.

The cows certainly seemed less intrigued by the automated dairy system than the farmers who visited the Averills’ dairy during a recent open house organized by DeLaval.

While DeLaval first patented the idea for robotic milkers in 1978 and made them commercially available in the late 1990s, the technology didn’t really hit its stride until the mid-2000s, said Brown.

Several other manufacturers also produce robotic systems, including Lely, GEA, BouMatic and Insentec.

With the growing strength of computer power and the increased familiarity of dairymen with the technology, such milkers are now catching on, Brown said.

“It’s become really reliable and accepted,” he said.

The robotic systems have gained in popularity even though they’re a more expensive option over the lowest-cost milking parlors, said Tranel of Iowa State University.

The lowest-cost milking parlor systems equate to 25 cents to $1 per hundredweight in milking costs, compared to $2 to $3 per hundredweight with robots, he said.

Maintenance and repairs can also be expensive for robotic systems, running about $7,000 to $9,000 per year, he estimated.

“It’s definitely not the cheapest way to milk a cow, but there are other factors encouraging producers to put in robots,” Tranel said. “The bottom line is cows like them and people like them.”

Aside from labor concerns, there are “quality of life factors,” since dairymen are less physically tied to the facility, he said. “Someone doesn’t always have to be there.”

Don Averill, whose family owns the dairy, said he decided to invest in the robotic milkers and other machinery when undertaking an expansion of the operation.

The primary motivation was reducing the need for labor, which has grown more scarce in recent years, he said.

With automated equipment performing many of the duties in the dairy barns, management of the operation is easier for Averill, who can attend to other tasks.

Averill also sees the system as less stressful for the cows, as they’re able to set their own routine without frequent interactions with humans.

For example, the automated brushes provide the perk of entertaining the cows while they’re being cleaned, he said. “It gives them something to do. That’s cow TV.”

Apart from improving the health and longevity of his cows, the system is expected to increase their productivity, Averill said.

Before the system’s installation, the cows were only milked twice a day. Once their bodies are at full holding capacity, they stop producing milk. Now, the herd is milked three times a day, so they don’t hit that limit.

A major advantage of robotic milkers is information about the health and production of individual cows, since the systems provide “instantaneous data,” Tranel said.

Yield is measured on a per-cow and per quarter-udder basis, so a farmer can quickly notice if a cow may be getting sick or if there’s an infection on one of its teats.

If there are changes to the herd’s feed rations, the impact on production also quickly becomes evident, he said.

By informing farmers whether new techniques are helpful or detrimental, the system allows for “day by day management,” Tranel said. “They can gauge that pretty quickly.”

Each robotic milker costs roughly $200,000, but the total cost will depend on how much a dairy must be retrofitted to accommodate the units and which type of gate system the farmer prefers, Brown said.

Manure scrapers cost about $30,000 per unit, feed pushers cost about $20,000 and touch-activated brushes cost about $2,600 each, he said.

Robotic systems are best suited for dairies with about 260 or fewer cows, as larger operations can achieve greater profits with low-cost milking parlors, said Tranel. “For me, it’s more of a smaller-farmer technology.”

Robotic systems that involve a major upfront investment are often more difficult for dairies to manage than traditional milking parlors, in which the labor costs are more spread out, said Mathew Haan, a dairy educator at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the systems.

That challenge is mitigated by dealers who can lease the equipment or banks that agree to finance it, Haan said. “It makes it much more attractive from a financial standpoint.”

Pendleton Grain Growers, which has been hammered in recent years by financial problems and poor wheat harvests, will explore the option of detaching its grain division, General Manager Rick Jacobson announced Wednesday.

The co-op will consider selling, merging or entering into a joint venture with a third party before the next growing season, Jacobson said. An export company or neighboring co-op might be interested, he said, but there are no offers on the table.

The grain division will continue to buy and operate as usual until a transaction is completed, Jacobson said in a prepared statement. The decision was approved by PGG’s board of directors.

Board Chairman Tim Hawkins said it didn’t make economic sense for the co-op to continue operating the grain business itself.

“The grain business is one that requires scale to ensure competitiveness, and our grain division did not attract enough handle this year for us to effectively move forward,” Hawkins said in a prepared statement.

The board’s first choice is to have another co-op handle the grain division, but exporters are considering the investment as well, he said.

“The decision will come down to who offers the greatest value for our members,” Hawkins said in the statement released Wednesday morning.

“We had informed the growers in meetings that the future of the grain business would be evaluated based on the size of the handle this year,” Hawkins said in the statement. “PGG greatly appreciates the support of the producers that brought us their grain, but there simply were not enough of them.”

PGG does not have a deadline for striking a deal, other than before the next harvest season.

The co-op has been wobbling for several years. Since 2014 PGG has sold or closed several divisions, laid off employees, reduced excess inventory, restructured its debts into a new loan package and obtained a $20 million line of credit in response to the financial problems. Jacobson said in June that PGG was positioned to make a profit in 2015.

Earnings at the end of June were $4 million above the same time in 2014, the co-op reported.

But a lack of moisture and intense heat early in the season “pinched” dryland wheat crops for some PGG growers, resulting in yield reductions of 25 to 30 percent and protein levels higher than exporters prefer. Meanwhile, the price dropped and Gavilon, a grain handling company owned by the Japanese firm Marubeni Corp., opened a truck transfer station in Union County, giving growers another option for selling wheat.

PGG’s members include about 300 wheat growers, Jacobson said.

It may be close to Halloween before a district attorney decides whether to bring charges against a man who shot a protected gray wolf while hunting coyotes in Eastern Oregon.

Harney County District Attorney Tim Colahan said he’s waiting for evidence and reports from neighboring Grant County, where the shooting was reported Oct. 6. Colahan is handling the case as a courtesy because the Grant County prosecutor reportedly knows the hunter’s family and wanted to avoid an appearance of a conflict of interest.

The hunter, identified so far only as a Grant County resident, reported to Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife that he’d killed a wolf while hunting coyotes on private property south of Prairie City.

The hunter met with ODFW and Oregon State Police personnel, who investigated and recovered the wolf’s carcass. Wolves are protected under state and federal Endangered Species Act laws, depending on the location, and it’s a crime to kill one except to defend human life.

Ranchers in Oregon’s Northeastern corner can shoot wolves caught in the act of attacking livestock or herd dogs, but there have been no cases reported of that happening.

As with all criminal investigations, Oregon district attorneys have the authority to file charges, present evidence and ask a grand jury to return an indictment, or decide not to prosecute.

ODFW identified the dead wolf as a male designated OR-22, which dispersed from the Imnaha Pack in February 2015. He had no mate or pups, according to ODFW.

OR-22 was the third Oregon wolf to die since late August. The Sled Springs pair, a male and female, were found dead of unknown cause in Wallowa County the week of Aug. 24.

Portland and neighboring cities won’t expand their urban growth boundaries any time soon, temporarily easing the development pressure on farmland in the tri-county metro area.

Neither the population growth forecast nor the job growth forecast supports adding new land for development, said Martha Bennett, chief operating officer of Metro, the regional land-use planning agency. Metro’s elected council will most likely adopt Bennett’s recommendation in November.

Metro coordinates land-use planning in Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas counties, which include the cities of Portland, Hillsboro, Beaverton and Gresham and 1.5 million people.

But the counties, Washington and Clackamas in particular, also are strong agricultural production areas. Farmers grow nursery crops, Christmas trees, seed crops, vegetables, fruit and berries within short drives of city limits, which makes for contentious land-use decisions.

Oregon’s land-use planning system was intended to protect farmland from city sprawl. Cities are required to establish urban growth boundaries, and expanding beyond them requires a public process often accompanied by conflict.

Metro, which has an elected council, attempted to ease the repeated short-term arguments by establishing urban and rural reserves, designating which land will be developed and which land will remain farm or forest for the next 50 years.

Legal challenges have prevented full implementation of the reserves plan, however.

In the meantime, Clackamas County commissioners are pressing to redesignate some land south of Wilsonville from rural to urban reserves. They’re opposed by farm groups such as Friends of French Prairie.

Given the uncertainty and reduced population and job growth expectations, Bennett recommended Metro hold off on urban growth expansion. She said the council should revisit the question in 2017-18.

Mt. ANGEL, Ore. — Over the course of his four decades in farming, Leonard Heidt has found a half-dozen thornless “sport” canes growing from otherwise thorny Marionberries.

All of those turned out to have undesirable characteristics, such as low berry yields and deformed blooms that rendered the plants unsuitable for commercial farming.

For that reason, Heidt was cautiously optimistic when he came across a sport a decade ago that seemed to produce fruit as well as the thorny varieties of Marionberries.

Years of field testing convinced him that the cultivar would be viable and he applied for a plant patent for the variety in 2012, which is still pending.

The patent application has allowed Heidt to begin selling “Willamette Thornless Marion” variety to other growers and collect a royalty payment of 10 cents per plant.

Since then, Heidt estimates the thornless cultivar has been planted on about 200 acres as growers gain confidence in the variety.

“I do think it’s going to eventually replace the regular Marion, if it proves to have the same durability,” he said.

Thornless Marionberries provide farmers with the benefit of being easier to handle, but they also appear to preserve fruit quality during mechanical harvesting, Heidt said.

“They’re not getting hit with the stickers, so the berries’ cells aren’t as damaged,” he said.

For processors and end users of berries, the main concern is that pieces of thorny stems will be found in pies, jams and other products, Heidt said.

“The liability is the number one concern,” he said.

Because that worry is eliminated with his variety, Heidt has established a deal under which the Willamette Valley Fruit Co. of Salem, Ore., pays growers a premium of five cents per pound for thornless Marionberries.

“We live in an environment where food safety is really critical,” said Dave Dunn, general manager of the Willamette Valley Fruit Co.

Dunn said there’s a “delicate balance” involved in promoting the cultivar’s thornlessness without disparaging the regular thorny Marionberries that are still the predominant variety in the area.

The company processed 1 million pounds of the thornless variety last year and has found strong support for the cultivar among buyers, he said. “The market looks really good for them.”

Willamette Valley Fruit Co. wants to expand acreage of the crop but is doing so warily to ensure the brand isn’t misrepresented, Dunn said.

For example, the company wants to work with trusted growers and processors who won’t mix the cultivar with other thorny berries, but then market them all as thornless, he said.

Heidt hopes to forestall this possibility by certifying fields as thornless and estimating their expected production.

Farmers also need to be sure the new variety will perform well in the field — at this point, the plants have withstood low winter temperatures well, but those in the ground are still relatively young, Dunn said.

“So far, the data looks good,” he said.

Some canes from the cultivar do occasionally revert to growing thorns, and these should be removed, Heidt said. Plants seem particularly prone to this problem if their roots are damaged, he said.

COQUILLE — Amy Flora has joined the ranks at Winter Lakes School as the new vice principal.

COQUILLE — Amy Flora has joined the ranks at Winter Lakes School as the new vice principal.

Confined animal feeding operations in Oregon can now work under state-issued water quality permits instead of the federal Clean Water Act permitting system.

As of Oct. 21, the Oregon Department of Agriculture has made available “water pollution control facilities” permits to livestock operations that don’t discharge runoff into surface waters.

These state permits won’t require CAFOs to file annual reports to farm regulators, thus reducing paperwork, and they won’t be subjected to public notice-and-comment requirements if they expand, said Wym Matthews, manager of ODA’s CAFO program.

“We don’t have to inform the public of changes on the farm,” he said.

Expansion plans at several Oregon dairies recently met with opposition from vegan and environmental groups, which used the public comment procedures to object to CAFOs as inhumane and unhealthy.

Livestock groups were concerned by the backlash because the public disclosures include maps and other data about CAFOs, which they fear will be exploited by animal rights activists.

State permits may be preferable for livestock operators who don’t want to be part of the federal Clean Water Act permitting system, but roughly 80 percent of the 522 CAFOs in Oregon are expected to remain federally permitted, Matthews said.

These CAFOs generally prefer to stick with the federal permits for legal reasons, he said.

Operating under a federal “national pollutant discharge elimination system” permit protects CAFOs from citizen lawsuits for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act, he said. “You can’t get that with a state permit.”

Oregon began requiring all CAFOs to operate under the federal system in 2002 due to regulatory changes at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, he said.

Federal court decisions have since held that EPA can’t require NPDES permits for operations that don’t actually discharge, which is why Oregon is making the state permits available, Matthews said.

However, once a CAFO is found to discharge into surface water, it must switch over to the federal permit system, he said.

Another major change that will affect both state and federal CAFO permits is that operations will be required to test soil samples every year to ensure the ground isn’t being overloaded with nutrients, Matthews said. Previously, such tests were required once every five years.

“The sampling basically validates the nutrient management system,” he said.

Dairies and other CAFOs are allowed to broadcast manure on fields as long as nitrogen and other nutrients are applied at rates that are taken up by crops and don’t enter the water.

Under the new testing requirement, CAFO operators must test at least 20 percent of their fields a year, and they must test different fields each year, Matthews said.

The ODA also has the option of requiring annual tests of all their fields, if it’s seen as necessary, he said.

Strand Hall, the home of the Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences for the past century,

reopens Tuesday in Corvallis after a $25 million restoration project.

Portland architect Doug Reimer said it was the most enjoyable project he’s worked on in his 30-plus year career.

The work included extensive seismic stability and accessibility improvements. The latter included making bathrooms and four entrances accessible to people using wheelchairs, and adding an elevator that reaches the fourth floor. An older elevator reached only the third floor. The dean’s office was moved from the first floor to the fourth floor. The building’s wiring, sprinkler system, fire alarms and heating and cooling systems were renovated or updated throughout.

“It was pretty antiquated,” said one of the project leaders, Kevin Cady of Hoffman Construction in Portland.

The work may have accomplished something else: Restored the College of Ag to its central place on campus, as was intended in a 1909 master plan developed by famed landscape designer John Charles Olmsted. He was the nephew and adopted son of Frederick Nelson Olmsted, who designed New York’s Central Park.

The younger Olmsted’s campus design had Strand Hall facing east and west into both of OSU’s “quads,” the rectangular spaces criss-crossed by sidewalks, lined with graceful trees and bordering the Memorial Union, Kerr Library and other notable buildings.

Strand, designed by John Benes, was built in three phases in 1909, 1911, and 1913. Over time, however, the “double fronted” look and grandeur of Strand Hall diminished, said Reimer, the renovation project architect.

“As you can imagine, 100 years of remodeling has a tendency to mess up the original idea that the architect had,” Reimer said.

As administrators over the decades tried to squeeze in more offices, workers made such changes as narrowing the hallways and dropped ceilings.

“But it still had really good bones,” Reimer said. The characteristics uncovered and restored included high ceilings, generous corridors and tall windows, which let in a lot of natural daylight, he said.

The work reconnects with Olmsted’s campus vision, Reimer said.

“Dreamers and master planners, take heart,” he said, “because sometimes it takes 106 years to come true.”

In an OSU news release, ag college Dean Dan Arp said the work restored Strand “beyond its former glory.”

The two-year, $24.9 million project was paid for by a combination of state bonds and a state Energy Loan Program.

The reopening ceremony is at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27, at the building’s West Portico entrance, looking out upon the Memorial Union quad.

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore (AP) — Although the administrative headquarters of Jeld-Wen moved to Charlotte, N.C., the company’s CEO and President Kirk Hachigian said Klamath Falls remains the “nucleus” of the $3.5 billion company.

The window and door manufacturer, initially owned and operated by the late Richard “Dick” Wendt and later purchased by Canadian investment firm Onex sells products worldwide in 20 countries.

Despite the company’s reach, Hachigian expressed a deep commitment to the company’s roots in Klamath Falls.

“We’re not leaving Klamath Falls,” Hachigian declared.

In a wide-ranging interview with Herald and News on Hachigian made clear the company’s intentions to keep much of the operations in Klamath County and Oregon.

Hachigian took the helm of the company in March 2014, succeeding former CEO Philip Orsino.

He spoke about the company’s history and strategic goals, as well as the company’s launch of an expanded customer support center in Klamath Falls.

The expanded customer support center will handle questions such as warranties or purchasing decisions, Hachigian said, and is representative of the company’s continuing commitment to the Klamath Basin.

Also, Jeld-Wen has added 20 engineers to its research and development laboratory in Klamath Falls. The company employs roughly 1,000 employees in the city.

“We still have the bulk of our production, manufacturing, engineering, customer service, customer care, accounts receivable, accounts payable, most of those functions are still all out of Klamath Falls,” Hachigian said.

Jeld-Wen purchases Ponderosa pine from surrounding forests to manufacture its doors here. Hachigian noted the company is highly efficient in its process.

“One-hundred percent of the log is used for construction purposes,” he said. “Nothing is wasted.”

Jeld-Wen facilities are also located in Chiloquin, Bend, Stayton and Portland, with 2,000 employees total in Oregon; 10,000 in North America and 20,000 worldwide.

“They have different operations in each of those facilities,” Hachigian said. “Some of them are windows, some of them are doors, some of them are mills.”

A need for efficiency and struggles during the recession led the company to relocate its administrative headquarters to Charlotte in 2013, which houses approximately 100 to 150 staff.

He noted the company fell on hard times during the recent recession.

“They took on a lot of investments and ancillary businesses,” Hachigian said. “They invested in timber lands, they invested in some different resorts and golf courses.

“We all know what happened in the banking crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009, and so the business had too much debt. It wasn’t able to survive the downturn. There were a lot of financial stresses on the organization.”

Onex, a Canadian private investment firm, bought the company in 2011, and invested about $800 million in Jeld-Wen.

“The business has made a remarkable turnaround over the last five years,” Hachigian said.

“Our sales today are about where they were pre-crisis. Our profitability today has been restored to about where it was pre-crisis.”

Hachigian emphasized the shift in headquarters to North Carolina doesn’t mean a loss of commitment to Klamath Falls.

“It’s still the epicenter of all the innovation globally for Jeld-Wen and it’s still a very, very important cultural and functional part of the organization,” he said.

Hachigian said the East Coast location puts the headquarters close to key Jeld-Wen operations as well as a much larger airport.

“Klamath Falls is a difficult location to service a global enterprise,” Hachigian said. “In Klamath Falls, it’s just difficult to get to most of the country. You have to have private transportation.”

Hachigian said many of Jeld-Wen’s major customers are located approximately within 500 or 1,000 miles of Charlotte, providing efficiencies in company travel. Jeld-Wen owns one aircraft compared to five since moving the administrative headquarters to Charlotte.

During the last nine months, Jeld-Wen has acquired four companies globally — two of them located in the United States, one in Australia and one in Europe.

Hachigian said recent acquisitions by the company, which are some of the first in at least five years, are a sign of the company’s prosperity and return to profitability.

“You can’t make those acquisitions if you’re not healthy yourself,” he said. “It’s a sign of confidence from the investors in our company that they’re willing to give us that kind of cash to go spend on acquisitions, and I think it’s a sign that we have an optimistic view of the economy as we go forward.”

Moving forward, Hachigian sees the possibility of Jeld-Wen becoming a publicly traded company. No timeline has been set for an initial public offering on the stock market, however.

“The company is doing better than it has ever done historically,” Hachigian said.

BEND, Ore. (AP) — Sap dripping from lodgepole pines this year came as the first sign of an insect invasion mounting in the Newberry Volcano caldera.

By next year, trees killed by the mountain pine beetle should stick out from healthy trees — because of their telltale red needles.

“We are just starting to get a new beetle outbreak,” Amy Tinderholt, recreation team leader for the Bend-Fort Rock Ranger District of the Deschutes National Forest, said Thursday.

Hoping to curb the outbreak before it leaves widespread dead and potentially dangerous trees standing in campgrounds around Newberry National Volcanic Monument, the national forest plans to thin out lodgepole stands there. The caldera is home to Paulina and East lakes.

The “Shield Insect and Disease Project” would cover 2,938 acres in the caldera about 20 miles east of La Pine, according to the national forest.

Along with mountain pine beetle, the project would target gall rust, a fungal disease found in pines. The earliest the thinning and other work would occur is next fall, said Anne Trapanese, National Environmental Policy Act planner with the Bend-Fort Rock District.

Cutting trees, mowing brush and burning scrap is planned in and around nine campgrounds, as well as along the road up Paulina Peak and the roads leading in and out of the caldera from the east and west, she said. The road coming from the west is paved while the road coming from the east is not.

Clearing brush and small trees in 250-foot buffers along the roads would provide safer evacuation routes in the event of a wildfire, according to the national forest. But the main problem is the beetle.

“We have a forest health issue that we want to do something about,” Trapanese said.

Native to forests in the Northwest, the mountain pine beetle attacks pines by swarm, said Andy Eglitis, entomologist with the Deschutes National Forest. Oozing sap is how lodgepole pines try to combat the beetle, but with 500 or more of the insects on one tree they can kill it in a couple of days. The larvae of the mountain pine beetle do the most damage by eating the cambium, the living part of a tree under the bark.

Adult beetles can fly up to 10 miles and are about the size of a match head or grain of rice, about three-eighths of an inch long. “These guys are pretty small,” he said.

Mountain pine beetle outbreaks have hit Central Oregon before, Eglitis said, notably around La Pine and Crescent in the late 1970s until the late 1980s and along the Cascade Lakes Highway in the mid-1990s to late 2000s.

There are also records of huge outbreaks in Central Oregon in the 1840s and 1910s, Eglitis said. “It’s always been here.”

An outbreak leaves large stands of dead trees, which pose a falling hazard in places people frequent, like campgrounds, and could fuel a wildfire. The project aims to prevent these dangers.

“It is really about trying to make the area safe for visitation,” Eglitis said.

The beetles often go after the largest lodgepoles, Eglitis said, as the trees become more susceptible to attack as they get older.

Deschutes National Forest officials have yet to determine the details of what size of trees to cut in the caldera. U.S. Forest Service rules prohibit the cutting of trees larger than 21 inches in diameter at breast height, the standard measure of a tree’s size, in forests on the east side of the Central Oregon Cascades.

Wilderness advocates delivered more than 30,000 petitions to Sen. Ron Wyden’s Portland office Tuesday in support of designating Crater Lake and the surrounding area as protected wilderness.

The proposed boundaries for the Crater Lake Wilderness would make the national park into a 500,000-acre corridor of protected area.

That’s 2 1/2 times the size of the current park.

Wilderness designations are used to limit human activity, and can even include bans on motorized vehicles.  

Environment Oregon state director Rikki Seguin said she wants Wyden, D-Ore., to submit a bill on Crater Lake to Congress this year.

“The only way you can designate land as wilderness is by going through Congress,” said Seguin. “And that’s going to take a champ like Sen. Ron Wyden stepping up to the plate and introducing a bill.” 

Wyden visited Crater Lake this summer as part of his seven wonders of Oregon tour.  

After the trip, he drafted a bill to boost the outdoor recreation economy in the state.  

Wyden’s office says he would consider the wilderness protection proposed in the petitions.

July 6, 1927 - Oct. 18, 2015

July 6, 1927 - Oct. 18, 2015

MEDFORD, Ore. (AP) — Miners are asking the federal government to intervene and prevent Oregon from shutting down certain types of mining in wild salmon rivers like the Rogue.

The Mail Tribune reports that a consortium of mining interests filed a lawsuit Monday challenging the state’s five-year ban on most suction dredging. The group says federal mining laws trump state restrictions on federal lands.

The legislature passed a bill in 2013 that placed restrictions on dredging. It was designed to end at the end of 2015, giving lawmakers time to devise permanent rules. They never did.

If a lawmaker introduces legislation that would keep dredging restrictions on the table, it may be allowed to continue without a problem.

The suction dredging ban is set to begin in January. In-stream work usually begins in mid-June.

A Wasco County, Oregon, woman has a Nov. 2 court appearance set on charges she allegedly stole four cows.

Elizabeth Ann Turner is charged with four counts of first-degree theft involving cows belonging to Aaron Turner.

The Wasco County Sheriff’s Office describes the case as a civil dispute that degenerated into a criminal allegation. Other news accounts indicated a family dispute is at the heart of the charges. The county indictment does not spell out the relationship between Elizabeth Turner and Aaron Turner.

The alleged thefts happened on or about Oct. 5, according to the indictment.

Elizabeth Turner was in the news in September after wildfires scorched pasture and rangeland in much of Eastern Oregon and livestock owners ranchers were looking for feed or grazing land. According to a Capital Press account, Turner offered temporary grazing on 1,200 acres of dry pasture for displaced livestock, saying it could hold 50 to 100 cow-calf pairs for two months.

COQUILLE — Coos County's transient lodging tax work group has accomplished a lot in its three meetings so far, but there is work still left to be done.

COQUILLE — Coos County's transient lodging tax work group has accomplished a lot in its three meetings so far, but there is work still left to be done.