A heart for animals

She learned early that not all animals get better just because she cared for them.

“Most did not get better,” she said. “Which made me want to work harder to figure out how to make them better. The broken leg I couldn’t fix with a bandage — I wanted to learn how to fix that.”

Years later, Sigler has become a veterinarian and is now helping animals at the Associated Veterinary Medical Center in Walla Walla. 

To reach that dream, she attended four years of college and four years of veterinary medical school. And she married, had her first child and, oh yes, was a Pendleton Round-Up princess in 2004. Then she went by her maiden name, Tiah Pahl.

Two weeks after she started this first job in March, a pug puppy named Cricket came in with a broken leg. The puppy was so small, and the leg so damaged, Sigler couldn’t repair it. So instead, she amputated it — one of the first surgeries she performed solo.

“I know we can’t fix this broken leg, but I can still save this animal’s life,” she recalled. “It will just be a different life. Anytime we can reasonably save a life, I like to try.”

Most of Sigler’s childhood was spent as an Eastern Oregon farm girl. The only exception was three years in Virginia where her father, Ronald Pahl, attended law school. Otherwise she was on the farm, working with her animals.

“As soon as she could hold a cat, she wanted to take care of it,” said Pahl. “She always had a heart for animals.”

Pahl said when his daughter first took an interest in animals, he asked a veterinarian friend about it, and the vet had said all little girls go through a phase where they want to be veterinarians. 

But Sigler never grew out of it. 

Instead her ambition grew. In high school she worked at the Pendleton Veterinary Clinic, assisting the veterinarians there.

She graduated from Pendleton High School in 2002 and, after taking a year off to fight fire, headed to Oregon State University. 

During her second year at OSU, she was named to the Round-Up court.

Every year since she was five or six years old, Sigler volunteered during Round-Up in the Indian village. She organized and put up teepees, handed out food and helped with the dancing.

Everyone in the Pahl family has volunteered; Pahl himself has spent more than two decades helping out in the Indian village and was the first director from his family. Sigler was the first on the court.

Apple Maggots Controlled | Pest Control Options

The maggot flies lay their eggs in the flesh of usually sweet or subacid, thin-skinned apple varieties that ripen during the summer or early fall, and the legless apple maggots develop in the flesh of the fruit.

To avoid having your apples destroyed by apple maggots, as an apple grower you must 1) recognize the pest, 2) know what damage apple maggots cause, 3) understand the life cycle of these apple maggots, 4) recognize when apple trees are being attacked by apple maggots  or the apple maggot fly, and 5) know how to control and/or stop infestation

To get rid of apple maggots, you must first know what the fly looks like.

The apple maggot fly is about 5mm or 1/5 inch long. It is somewhat smaller than a house fly, has a white dot on its thorax, and on its wings it has a band of black that looks like an F (some say it looks like a W.)

The presence of larvae, or apple maggots, is the part of the apple maggot cycle which causes the damage to the fruit.  The larvae looks like a typical fly larva or maggot left on rotting meat or fish.

The apple maggots are very small, pale cream colored worms that feed on the “flesh” of the fruit as they tunnel their way under the apple’s skin.  Apple maggots have no head section or legs, have a wedge-shaped body, and have two small black hooks extending from the pointed “head” end when feeding

If left unchecked, infested apples soften, turn brown, and prematurely fall to the ground.  At that point, the apple maggot leaves the fruit and buries into the ground to overwinter and morph into a pupa.

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have nematodes in the ground getting rid of the pupae before it turns to a fly which creates these apple maggots?   You can read all about nematodes towards the end of the article in the post Natural Lawn Grub Control .

According to the Washington State University, the life cycle of the apple maggots are as follows:

a. In late June/early July until early October, flies begin to emerge from the pupae which have overwintered in the ground under previously affected fruit trees.  Their peak time is August.

b.