You'd think any Oregonian with a grain of sense would wait until January to fly off to Florida for a week or so but my son, Ross, called me last March and said, "Pop, for your birthday, I'm going to give you an all-expense paid week in Florida. Come on down!"

Well, this and that got in the way for us to make it happen; two things that were significant. The first being that my wife, Sue, went to work on a summer-long contract with the National Park Service to do a butterfly census in Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. The other being a new job for Ross, who is a Lt. Col. in this man's USAF Reserve.

Sue finished her contract on Labor Day, and Ross, who started out his career with the Air Force as an F-16 Instructor Pilot, and whom, like many service men and women, has done tours in the Middle East, recently took command of the 482nd Operations Group at Homestead AFB in Florida.

A little while back, I went to the defense of our much-maligned rodent-eating reptilian friend, the Western Rattlesnake. In that piece, I asked people to be considerate of where they go and how they act while in rattlesnake country. The same holds true when among rodents.

No one in their right mind would invite a rattlesnake into their lap to munch on a rodent, the same holds true for our friendly - sometimes way too friendly - peanut-eating, Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel, Spermophilius lateralis.

Rattlesnakes injure and kill people by biting and injecting venom; ground squirrels kill people by sharing their fleas that in turn bite people and inject one of the deadliest diseases to infect humanity: the Black Death. And, so you get the point, the fleas that carry the disease can be found on several species of rodents living throughout Central Oregon.

They were BIG, very big, stood about 12 feet to the top of their wooly head, about as long as a school bus and weighed around six tons. As long as you didn't bother them, they probably wouldn't bother you, if you got one mad, however, you were in a heap of trouble - but I'll bet they tasted good.

I saw a tooth and part of a tusk of one years back when I took a bunch of budding paleontologists on an OMSI fossil-collecting trip up the Columbia River near Arlington. One of the young men, an up-and-coming geologist (now retired), found it in sand and gravel deposited by the Missoula Floods. That tooth was massive, big as a football! Yes, by Jove, you have it: the Wooly Mammoth.

These magnificent early elephants roamed all over this country as the snow and glaciers of the last Ice Age melted, building up sprawling lakes around Millican, Christmas Valley, Fort Rock and Great Basin. Dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers feed on mammoths and ground sloths while cranes and herons that stood twice as big as present day species scavenged leftovers and man was living in his cave training wolf puppies to help him kill mammoths and sloths.

Among the magnificent variety of reptiles you may meet up with as you're wandering around the Northwest is the much maligned, greatly feared and infamous Great Basin Rattlesnake, a subspecies of the Western Rattlesnake, Crotalus viridis (spp).

Contrary to popular opinion, rattlesnakes are not "poisonous," they are venomous, and as such, they do pose a threat to humankind. However, the idea of "impending doom" to humans has been exaggerated to the point of absurdity. If you are in rattlesnake country, you should use the same amount of caution when you drive your vehicle through a construction project or school zone.

If you traveled any distance in a motor vehicle to visit the land of rattlesnakes, you have experienced a greater threat to your safety and welfare than meeting up with a snake. Motor vehicle accidents have killed and maimed - and are still killing and maiming - thousands of times more people than all the rattlesnake deaths in the US ever since we began keeping records about such things.

Summer is quickly sliding away, fall is soon to arrive and by October we'll see the end of the so-called "tick season." Although rare, tick-borne diseases can leave us with serious medical problems, perhaps one of the worst is the dreaded specter, Lyme disease (LD).

This illness is no laughing matter for the victim or the medical personnel trying to figure out what to do about it. If allowed to remain in our bodies for long, so many things can go wrong it becomes almost impossible to know how to combat all the ailments, or what they are and where they came from.

The "good news" is that the ticks in the above photo are local wood ticks, and as of today, are not known to carry Lyme disease bacterium. That distinction falls to the deer tick, a close cousin.