November 2015 Out and About

I can't believe it's been about six weeks since my last post, which must mean that fall is here and I'm holed up on the couch, binge watching something on Netflix.  I love the month of November, when the trees begin to shed their leaves in earnest, and the sunlight, when we get it, takes on those pale pastel shades associated with crisp, cold days.  The wind pierces my layers like a knife, reminding me that it is time for the long johns to go on and not come off, along with my uniform of beanie, scarf and fingerless gloves.  Tom Waits' song 'November' is a favorite of mine, the lyrics I never forget, "November seems odd, it's my firing squad; November".  I find myself disgruntled by the need to take off my gloves to cope with running water, and my usual love of cooking becomes a much more sedentary affair, mostly involving things that can be heated in the oven.  I know I sound like I'm describing living in a cabin and not an urban apt in central Portland, but I'm not wealthy and I tend to be frugal with the heat, and this season is clearly showing the dread effects of the El Nino pattern. It's been unusually cold already, and it's forecast to be a harsher winter than usual.  It makes me wince to think of the homeless being on the streets this time of year, and to wonder if the local wildlife suffer more than usual because of it.  Clearly they're much better prepared than you and I, with feathers and fur, but I wonder how this year's season seems to them after the past four or five fairly mild winters. And when that 4:30 pm sunset rolls around, I think of all the Junco's and House Sparrows and Pine Siskins that were on my balcony all day, now huddled in the trees and shrubs, feet locked around a branch, bracing against the next 14 hours of cold darkness.  It sounds rough, so I try to put out lots of extra seed for them, and wonder about the temperature fluctuations affecting food and water supplies, and hence, winter migration for all these little dudes.

Well, the weather means I'm certainly not birding as much as usual or spelunking around any given swampland, but I did get a chance to make a few trips out this last month, and I would love to share the details with you.  Here's the first half of the month, I'm going to post a separate entry for the last two weeks, as it's just too many pictures in one sitting.Should have learned my lesson after posting a zillion pictures from my October trip around Oregon, but it's hard to not want to share every spot, every image.

Ankeny and Baskett Slough NWR 11.02.15

Wanting to go somewhere different is always in my short list, so I decided I would take the drive down to Salem and hit up Ankeny and Baskett Slough in one afternoon.  I would have gone to William Finley as well, but I just ran out of time.
  
I headed to Ankeny first and stopped off at the Ankeny Hill Road overlook to soak up the view. Nothing like the green rolling hills of the Willamette Valley, farmland interspersed with the intermittent copse of beautiful old oaks and maples. The sunlight was gorgeous and lit up the fall foliage til everything seemed to glow gold and orange. I headed over to Eagle Marsh on Buena Vista Rd., where I was stoked to see a huge flock of Cackling geese, divided into the right and left sides of the pond.  Mixed in were good numbers of Mallards, Green-winged Teals, as well as Long-billed Dowitcher, and Dunlins, with a few Lesser Yellow-legs.  A Northern Harrier spooked all the geese to my left, but they collected themselves and resettled a little farther out.  And then although I don't think the harrier had touched it, a solo goose swimming directly in front of the blind had a convulsion and died. Very odd.

I chatted a bit with another birder and tagged along with him to the next pond at Egret Marsh. Much quieter there, so after a few moments I headed out to the walk through the woods at the Rail trail. Didn't see much, but was a pretty day and it felt good to stretch my legs. That can be the downside of long drives to birding spots; if there is just a blind or deck, and nowhere to walk, I feel robbed. This is often the case during winter too, the paths are in areas closed for migratory birds or early spring breeding.  

I headed onward to Baskett Slough, where I also stopped at the spectacularly pretty overlook to start. Such a great spot, with lots of birds flying in above you to the refuge below.  I drove in from the west side on Coville Road, and saw a couple Eagles, some ducks, sparrows, nothing unusual, but lots of lovely landscapes.  As the sun began to set, I headed back towards Salem, queuing up for rush hour traffic.
I need to remember to come down here more often, it's really relatively close to Portland, and a great change of scenery.  And then of course, a few days after my visit to Ankeny, the infamous Ruff appeared off of Buena Vista.  Wouldn't you know it?  Here are some pix:

Ankeny Hill Road overlook

 Eagle Marsh -Dunlin feeding

 Eagle Marsh lots of Cackling geese, and Mallards, Green-Winged Teals, etc

 a group of snoozing Dunlin kept safe by a ring of Cacklers

 Northern Harrier freaking out the geese

 Literally scaring this one to death..

 Long-billed Dowitchers, Mallards, and Dunlin

Dowitchers, Dunlins, and a lesser Yellow-legs in the foreground

 Boardwalk through the woods at rail trail, still in Ankeny

 Immature Bald eagle at Baskett Slough

 Baskett Slough overlook from highway 22

 Cacklers flying through a 1965 hunting postcard

 Golden-crowned sparrows hopping through the trees

 Beautiful golden hour light at Baskett

 Autumn foliage

Bald eagle roadside at Baskett Slough


Rentenaar Road, Sauvie Island 11.09.15

For whatever reason, I've managed to not spend much time on Rentenaar Road, although it's a great birding spot.  I guess it's because it's easy to get to and well known, so it's not as difficult as I like to make things.  And to be honest, I tend to shy away from the two-legged wingless mammals in any great number, so I'll head out into the woods or a longer trail that takes me off over there before I hit up the obvious place. But when it's hunting season, and all my usual options on Sauvie are off limits until April, it's Rentenaar Road, or Wapato Greenway, or a muddy three mile stagger to the Warrior Rock lighthouse.  But that's not a particularly bird filled walk for some reason. The newer Ruby wetlands back in the woods to the left of Warrior Rock path could be, but I havn't checked back in there for the past two seasons.  After the initial landscaping, the overgrowth got kind of thick, so who knows, it could be a birder's paradise.  But of course you need to be there on a non-hunt day to walk Rentenaar Rd. or the path out to Warrior Rock, so check your ODFW calendars.  For December of this year, non-hunt days are even numbered, as are January's. 

So I decided to head down Rentenaar to look for some winter sparrows, maybe I'd luck out with a White-Throated! If anything, it was a sunny day, so would probably be beautiful on Sauvie Island.
Well, it was Gold-crowned central, no White-throated's to be found.  But I saw a mixed flock of Snow geese and Cacklers, as well as some American White Pelicans and Sandhill Cranes overhead. Plenty of hunters in trucks and a few RV's, queued up at the ranger station camping for tomorrow morning's hunt.  A few were out stretching their legs on Rentenaar, and we said hello and looked at birds.  Always so interesting to me, the similar but different reasons we're both out in this natural place.  One to observe, one to kill.  Hmm.. Well, here are the pix:

 a flushed flock from the first field on the right contains both Cackling and Snow Geese

 flying beautifully in formation together

 What great colors on this Snow goose, reminds me of a White pelican

 the lovely sky and landscapes that Sauvie Island offers never cease to make me smile

 Golden-crowned sparrow posing for his close-up; it's my holiday card!

 speaking of American White Pelicans, I keep being surprised to still see them around..

 And these Sandhill Cranes, announcing their arrival with that crooning warble.. nothing else sounds like it.

 some more landscapes

 Kestrel in repose

go sparrow hawk!

 more Golden-crowned sparrows in the bushes

Brown Creeper creeping

Well, I'm going to wrap this post up here and try to get the second half of the month out in another post this weekend.  You can click on any picture to see it larger and remember to get out there on those sunny days and soak up the scenery.  Autumn is fantastic for birding, for once you can finally see into the trees without all the leaves!  It's also a great time to hike and explore, completely different from spring and summer and just as unique.  Until next time, happy trails!

Looking for the Peep show..

So it's August in Portland, and I havn't drowned in a puddle of my own sweat as I feared I might. That is promising. It is also that magical annual event where I give up on other birds altogether and pin my hopes on shorebird migration. The other birds have thinned out, as their fledglings have left the nest, and they themselves are beginning their own plans for end of summer and fall migration. All the shallow ponds and marshes of winter have either completely dried up, or what little that remains is not enough to support large populations. Whatever water is left and it's oozing muddy banks becomes a magnet for migratory shorebirds heading south; a place to search the mud for worms and little crustaceans to keep these cracked out little guys strong enough to keep heading south to their wintering grounds.  

You hear a lot about bird migration in the spring and fall, and it is an ongoing process and not really a fixed date, but the shorebirds actually start heading south as early as late June, early July. The weather and food supplies are the main impetus to jumpstart their annual clocks.  I myself face each August and September with a growing excitement, which is hilarious given the maddening qualities of shore bird watching.  I find my enthusiasm to embrace the challenge similar to young mothers who decide to have another baby after suffering through a horrible labor with the last.  Perhaps there is a hormone for birders much like oxytocin for mothers, that encourages me to forget the pain and frustration of last seasons fruitless racing around, and encourages me to try it all over again this summer..  sigh.

This summer I became a member of OBOL, which is an online birding post community for Oregon birders.  Aka, I've officially joined the nerd squad.  That's OK, you can say it, I barely wince at all anymore.  And another thing, I can go without my binoculars for days at a time, several days.  I just choose not to. So anyway, I can now follow posts from all over the state, of up to date bird sightings, which is kind of a cool thing.  And while I'm pretty sure I'm not interested in becoming the person who drives hundreds of miles to see one bird, check it off my list and then drive home, I do appreciate having some insider info on the whereabouts of migratory peeps.  I'd been seeing ongoing sightings all up and down the coast for various shorebirds, from terns to plovers to turnstones, and sandpipers were starting to show up.  So I chose the 17th of August to do a grand 150 mile sweep from the tip of the Oregon coast in Astoria down to Florence, which is about halfway down the state. This was ambitious I know, and honestly I wouldn't have tried to do so much coastline in one day but I was trying to tie in a visit to an inland refuge on the second day of my trip.  That spot is Fern Ridge NWR and it's just west of Eugene, about an hour inland from Florence. The coastal winds had been kind of strong with 30 mph gusts but it was supposed to die down by the morning I left.  I also wasn't trying to time my visits to any spots with high or low tide, as would have been smarter, because I had just one day to get down to Florence and I was just going to have to take what I could get regardless of where the tide was.

So I packed up and hit the road at 7:40am, heading out NW to Astoria on Highway 30.  Rolled up to the Astoria Safeway for a coffee and bathroom break two hours later and then headed out to Fort Stevens.  I headed over the big dune from parking lot B and walked north along the beach to the South Jetty.  The morning fog still lay over the surf and the beach and it looked amazing, like an alien landscape. It eventually lifted a bit and I saw a variety of gulls, including Heerman's which are my new fave for the west coast.  It's those crazy red beaks.  I seem to love all birds with a red accessory, oystercatchers, skimmers, pigeon guillemots, puffins, and now Heerman's gull.  Unbelievably, I found a dozen sand dollars, and put them in one of my handy plastic bags I keep at the ready for natural souvenirs; never know what you're going to find.  I headed over to the rocks and clambered around looking at starfish, but the sun was too bright already for taking pictures at this angle, so I headed back towards the parking lot.  I saw two dead birds down the beach from one another, both common murres, it was kind of weird. And then I saw what were to be the only shorebirds I would see on the coast all day long, a pack of about 15 semi-palmated plovers.  They've got funny personalities, not as skittish as some other shorebirds.  Most were juveniles, but one of the adults had an injured left leg and hopped around regardless, eating and taking care of business.  Better a leg than a wing, am I right?

                                       heerman's gull with that red beak

                                      california gull

                                      immature herring gull

                                       calfornia and heerman's gull

                                       common murre challenged by the life force

                                       semi-palmated plovers

       

                                     this adult plover has an injured leg, whah!!
                                   
I got back to the car, with my pics of the plovers and my bag of sand dollars, thinking this was going to be the start of a great shore birding day! Wrong...  It just went so downhill from there.  I guess the best that I can say is that I now know the locations of several birding spots I didn't before.  Maybe they'll come into play this fall once the water fills up the marshes and estuaries again.  Needless to say, many hours later around 4pm, I sat high up on the hillside of the Nestucca Bay wildlife refuge, eating my boxed Asian chicken salad from Safeway, staring morosely at the family of barn swallows swooping all over the valley in the now gusty winds that weren't supposed to be happening.  What to do, what to do?  I was now exhausted from 8 hours of driving and fruitless stops and I wasn't even through Lincoln City yet.  How the hell was I going to make it to Florence and to my campground by sunset?  I decided to quit making stops and just put the pedal to the metal and head south to Florence.

Driving through Newport and past Seal Rock I realized I was in territory I had only been through once, many years ago now for an annual retreat at the bar I worked at.  I had found and rented us this ridiculous beach playhouse in Yachats for a night, and I recall that it wasn't on the ocean.  We had to walk down the road and effectively jump a fence to get to the shore, and the beach was completely nondescript.  No features of any kind come to mind, just seemingly miles of flat sandy beach.  And I had never been back to that area or really anywhere in central Oregon, all my trips either taking me to the north or more recently to the southern coast. And getting there always involves taking I-5 and then cutting over on highway 38 at Reedsport.  So I was really surprised to find some stunning coastline just south of Yachats, all curves and rocky cliffs, very few towns or houses for that matter.  I'm determined to come back here soon and explore, but for now I was on a schedule.  I finally hit Florence and decided to try to find the north jetty of the Siuslaw River before I went to the campground.  Just maybe I'd luck out and find some peeps feeding at dusk. The road out was an eight mile long park road running parallel to the coast just inland from the dunes, and by the time I got out to the river, the wind was gusting like crazy.  There was a small flock of ducks that I scared off when I pulled up, but the rest was just a handful of gulls with their heads low and into the wind.  I didn't even bother walking out to the ocean from the jetty. There wasn't going to be anything there in wind like this..

I decided I also didn't want to spend the night in a campground just on the other side of the dunes in wind like this either.  Especially as I was just going to get up early and haul ass inland to Fern Ridge. So I headed east and drove about 30 miles alongside the Siuslaw River to get to the Whitaker Creek campground.  I pulled in at dusk, found a spot, and set up my bed, made some food, had a drink and read for a while.  It was about 10pm and I was getting tired, looking forward to what might be a good first night of camping.  I don't always sleep well the first night out, but this campground was fairly quiet and I was feeling sleepy.  Just as I could feel myself about to drift off, I heard a scraping along the underside of my truck.  It jarred me awake, and I slapped the inside of the truck and hissed, assuming it was raccoons trying to get to the food I'd locked in the front of the truck.  It stopped and I lay back down and shut my eyes.  Then again, a frantic scratching.   I sat up in a panic and grabbed my flashlight to look under and around the truck; nothing.  What the hell was going on?  Back in the truck I tried to settle down again... Well, I'm sure you can see where this is going by now. No rest for the wicked or crazed birders either.  Maybe I had pissed off Neptune by being greedy with my sand dollars and this was his repayment?  I know most people would have just said screw it, and gone to sleep regardless, but I'm not hardwired that way.  It finally occurred to me that the scratching was coming from inside my truck cab and it was a creature trying to get out.  I was too tired to do anything about it at this point, I'd have to deal with it in the morning.  I think I fell asleep around 2:30 and at 6:15 I got up to pee and thought to myself, "gee, if I had had a full night's sleep, this would a great time to pack up and head east". But I knew that I needed a little more sleep or I would be useless birding much less driving home to Portland.  I opened the cab doors to my truck, giving my little critter a chance to escape and then tried to get back to sleep.  I got up again an hour and a half later, made myself some tea and packed up the truck.  If my nighttime buddie made it out, I never saw it.  I really hope so, I really don't want to have to smell hot dead little rodent in a week.

I got to Fern Ridge about a half hour later and pulled out my printouts with all the stops I planned to make.  It's a pretty big lake and local residents driving it's perimeter like to haul ass on the back country roads, so good luck trying to see road signs for the first time.  I did a lot of turning around to backtrack throughout the day.  I did have a decent start birding, although the sun was high and bright and the thermometer was starting to climb.  It got up to about 93 that by afternoon which is painful to be out in especially if your last stop is a shadeless mile long road, out and back again. My pictures are a bit blurry, as peeps are cracked out and sensitive to proximity.  Some would argue isn't this the case with all birds?  And you'd be right in most regards, but not all peeps are equal. Peeps really force the serious birder to acknowledge the need for a good birding scope and/or a really high quality telephoto lens if you want decent photos.

                                     this little immature california dude was killing me

                                      american bittern in horrible light

Adult and young western grebe

                                      amphibian love in remaining water

                                       immature california with crayfish

                                      long billed dowitchers

                                      greater yellowlegs and pectoral sandpiper

                                       ruddy duck

                                       lesser yellowlegs

                                      more long billed dowitchers

                                      fern ridge from the viewing platform

                                        the hotly contested and unopened gate

                                      peepshow

                                      this land used to all be an ocean at one time..

                                      oh killdeer, how I want to throttle you...

                                      greater yellowlegs and various western peeps

                                       western sandpipers seriously camouflaged

                                      more peepshow

                                      this little crayfish was crafty, but not fast enough..

As I edit my photos after the fact, forcing the best of the image to emerge, they're still laughably pathetic compared to any of the hundreds of high quality photos taken by semi-pro birders on Flickr sites.  Oh well, you pick your battles, and I like to think that I create more of a thematic visual essay which creates a deliberate sense of place. At least that's how I justify it to myself, more like the shitty photos are consistent at creating a somewhat hazy and mysterious alternate reality.  Kind of like camping and birding in a sci-fi novel.  It keeps me interested, clearly, so that's all that matters. And as for the annual temptation of the shorebirds, it's clear that I'm a goner, a lifer.  It's the lure of the bastard.  You can see any of the photos I didn't include in this post on my flickr page, just click on the link on the top right of blog and click on any of the blog photos to see it full size.  Until next time, Happy trails!