Spokane firefighters give Chief, a 10-year-old cat, oxygen after he was found hiding in a basement during a house fire.
Kansas Cow Rush
Has this ever happened to anyone? I had the bright idea of taking photos of cows in the fog when all of a sudden they started rushing toward me. There was a fence between us, but in less than a minute I was face to face with mooing cows.
They either…
A) wanted to say hi
B) were hella mad
C) wanted moo cuddles
The Stuff of Legends —
Legend has it this couch has been passed around from one Spokane journalist to another. Now the cushy green couch has made its new home at @SpoCats HQ.
It’s the new hang out for the moonlighting newsies notoriously known to crash neighborhood meetings with their kitteh shenanigans. We don’t know how they do it, but they tweet too. Weird, right?
According to our sources, the couch was passed down from a Spokesman Review reporter to a former web producer. It was then handed off to a SR web developer and now it belongs to cats.
I guess that’s the nature of things.
App: Instagram
Filter: Rise
Contrast: Increased
My Very First AP Wire Hit
Charlie wouldn’t understand the festivities happening around him because he’s a wild animal, a red-tail hawk eying the room in a way one does to understand their surroundings and survive.
He’s the oldest living red-tail hawk in the entire world as defined in the longevity records by falconers. His home is Washington State University with the Raptor Club. Calculations have estimated his age to equal about 234 human years.
If a human being lived 234 years, they’d been born just after the signing of the United State’s Declaration of Independence. They’d live through one civil and two world wars. They’d see a man walk on the moon.
A certain birthday boy, Charlie, did not witness all those things, but this is just an illustration to say how old he is. It was his 31st birthday on Thursday and he was surrounded by friends and acquaintances.
I say friends because the members of the Washington State University Raptor Club love him. His fellow birds really aren’t social so let’s call them acquaintances.
Next thing I know, the story was picked up by the AP. A fellow producer texted me while I was in the grocery store taking pictures of a dead fly on a package of pickled radishes. I may or may not have jumped up and down.
PULLMAN, Wash. - A 31-year-old red tail hawk living in Washington State University’s raptor club may be the oldest of his kind.
KXLY TV reports that Charlie the hawk’s handlers celebrated his birthday Friday. They calculate that at 31, Charlie has lived the equivalent of about 234 human years.
This is a career first for me. Excuse me while I twirl.
The piglets of Cable Creek Farm had their first peek of the world Wednesday morning. The farm welcomed over a dozen young ones to a life of pastures neighboring a llama, a milk cow and two hyper dogs.We stopped by the farm to find Beth Tysdal, owner, sporting her Carhartt work clothes, fussing with two litters of piglets from two new mothers.
The sad fact of farming. These piggies will be bacon one day. They’re cute though.
As I walked with Tysdal to the farm house to meet the piglet getting bottle-fed, she told me some of them didn’t make it. One was still born. Two others died at birth. One was stepped on by the mother, killing it.
I asked, “Did you bury them?”
She responded, “No… We just threw them away.”
Life is tough on a farm.
On that sad note, let’s talk about something positive. The Cable Creek Farm just got a milk cow which has come in handy for feeding some of the piglets who can’t seem to get the opportunity to nurse by their mothers.
From my notes:
Keri Wilson’s chickens chase the cats.
“They’re not itty-bitty hens. They’re quite large and bossy,” Wilson described.
They’re Jungle Fowl originally from Indonesia. Wilson says they eat anything that moves. They’re omnivores.
“People want to believe that they’re these lovely little things they have at the fair, but they’re these fabulous surviving dinosaurs that have learned to make their way by eating everything.”
One ate a mouse the other day. Yikes. That’s free-range for you.
Clarkston Chicken Lays Egg With A Secret
Keri Wilson has seen a lot of weird things on her family’s farm Wilson Banner Ranch near Clarkston, but this is one incident she’ll never forget. While collecting her chicken’s eggs yesterday, they found a surprise - a rather large egg.
“I called my parents to come down to the house. With an egg that big, the chicken can damage their insides. It’s the equivalent to giving birth to a basketball,” Wilson said over the phone with a cringe. After a quick inspection, Wilson said all the girls were in good health.
Wilson and her husband inspected the egg last night, cracking it open into a pan.
“What was in there?” Wilson asked as she pondered the strange behavior of her chickens that she described them as just little dinosaurs and not the lovely little creatures they have at the fair.
Dozens of cats were known to be at the Hillyard home being searched for animal hoarding. Four cats were already in the vehicle. It was dark inside the van during the rainy day, so I turned on the flash so you can see their eyes.
Animal control officers search through a small shed structure to find hoarded cats stuck in their own filth.
There were litter boxes inside the shed, but without anyone cleaning it, they had 3-4 inches of feces on top of them.
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Nicole Hensley is a reporter at The Spokesman Review.