OREGON
William ShakespEAR, a female Townsend’s big-eared bat from Butte Falls, Oregon, defended her title for the second year in a row in the “Bat Beauty Contest,” an annual contest hosted by the Bureau of Land Management to raise awareness about bat conservation, OPB News reported. Townsend’s big-eared bats are noted for having, well, very big ears — ears that measure half the length of their bodies. The contest, which coincides with International Bat Week, accepts photos of bats taken on public lands across the country starting Oct. 24 and ending on Halloween. Emma Busk, a BLM wildlife technician, photographed the winner. “There are a lot of myths around bats, but they’re amazing wildlife and they contribute so much to our ecosystem,” Busk told OPB. Not only do they keep the mosquito populations down, they look fabulous in the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny bikini competition.
ARIZONA
Congratulations to Alfredo Aliaga, 92, who became the oldest person to complete the Grand Canyon’s Rim-to-Rim hike, 24-miles long and with an elevation gain and loss of over 10,000 feet, Backpacker reported. Aliaga made it in 21 hours over two days, breaking a Guinness World Record for being the oldest person to finish (verification pending), succeeding the former record-holder, John Jempka, who was 91 years and 151 days old.This wasn’t Aliaga’s first rodeo: A Spanish-born geology enthusiast, he’s hiked the Rim-to-Rim twice before, first in 2019, with his daughter and son-in-law, and again last year. Aliaga’s wife died in 2006, his son-in-law, Jurgen Buchenau, told Backpacker, and he consoled himself by revisiting places they’d loved, including the Grand Canyon. Aliaga — who trained by walking three hours a day in Berlin, Germany, where he lives — is already planning a fourth hike in 2024. Meanwhile, we’re exhausted just thinking about all those back-and-forth transatlantic flights.
OREGON
If you’re going to Bend, Oregon, keep an eye out for Big Obvious Boulder, aka “Bob,” a rock with almost 6,000 Facebook fans. Bob is renowned for what you might call its “magnetic personality”: It tends to attract careless or distracted motorists, whose cars somehow end up high-centered on top of it, Central Oregon Daily News reported. The boulder sits at the entrance of a plaza at the corner of NE Third Street and Franklin Avenue, in case you want to drive over — carefully, please — and take a selfie, as scores of fans have. Kristin Morris, director of hearing care for My Hearing Centers, a business at the plaza, said that trucks seem to find Bob irresistible. “Trucks have hit it mostly and dragged the rock into the middle of the parking lot, and it’s had to be replaced back into its position many times,” Morris said. “People have actually driven on top of the rock and their cars get stuck.” According to Morris, this happened six times in just the last month. The people in those cars probably think “Obvious” is the wrong name for the boulder. Then again, Bob appears to be, literally, impossible to miss, at least for some drivers.
WASHINGTON
A strange-looking many-tentacled creature that washed up on a Whidbey Island beach has had scientists at odds about its identity, KentReporter.com reported. Ron Newberry of Admirals Cove found the sea creature on Ebey’s Landing beach one morning at low tide and sent a photo to the Whidbey News-Times. “I didn’t know for sure it was an octopus,” Newberry wrote in an email. “It’s pretty common to see large jellyfish washed up on shore.” When he posted the photo on the Whidbey Camano Land Trust’s social media pages, it attracted a lot of notice. An engineer from the Seattle Aquarium thought it looked like “a Dumbo octopus from the deep sea,” while a University of Washington biology professor could not identify it and sent the photo to other biologists for their opinion. Soon scientists from across the country were weighing in, including researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Smithsonian Institution. After much fanfare, a consensus was reached, confirming that the curious creature was a Haliphron atlanticus, i.e., a seven-armed octopus. The name is actually a misnomer: Males actually do have an eighth arm, but it’s kept “tucked up inside in a sac near its eye” and used for breeding, don’t ask us how. Anyway, hats, or gloves, off to Haliphron: We generally expect octopuses to have eight appendages, but here in the good ol’ USA, you have the right to bear as many arms as you want.
Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Nation and was raised by wolves in the Pacific Northwest. Her book, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison Books, 2019), was a Washington State Book Award nominee. She resides in north-central Idaho near the Columbia River Plateau, homeland of the Nimiipuu.
Tips of Western oddities are appreciated and often shared in this column. Write heard@hcn.org, or submit a letter to the editor.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Heard Around the West.
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