A week of sunshine and temperatures in the low 50’s almost convinced me that Spring was near, especially since it got me out birding again, but none of the birds we saw at Ft. Flagler were in breeding plumage yet.
In fact, most of them were definitely still in non-breeding plumage, like this Black-bellied Plover
which definitely lacked the black belly that the species is named after.
There were a few, though, that seemed to be gradually transitioning to breeding plumage
though they still weren’t recognizable as Black-bellied Plovers.
Most of the Sanderlings were still in non-breeding plumage, too.
None displayed the Rufus color I associate with Sanderling in breeding colors, but a few of them were definitely darker than the ones in winter plumage.
It turned out that the birds had a much better sense of what season it is after we ended up with a late snow day about a week after these pictures were taken.
I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday for Spring to arrive. Hopefully Mother Nature will remember to glance at her calendar.
I am a creature of habit, especially when it’s a habit I enjoy, like following a visit to Theler Wetlands with a visit to Port Orchard to check out seabirds I find there but not at Theler. I’ve been somewhat remiss about visiting Port Orchard in the last few years because they have been doing extensive repairs to the marina, which has chased most of the seabirds away. Luckily, they seemed to have completed repairs, and the birds have started coming back, even if not yet in the numbers they used to be seen there.
The marina used to be my go-to place to get shots of Horned Grebes in breeding colors because there were lots of them hanging around, but on this visit I only saw two in non-breeding plumage.
There were more Barrow’s Goldeneye than any other species, and I took lots of shots, but I like this little guy who was off on his own best.
I also got a shot of a female Hooded Merganser, one of Leslie’s favorite birds.
Probably the best shot of the day was this one of a Pelagic Cormorant drying off its wings.
You can do a lot with underexposed shots with modern photography apps, but nothing quite matches bright sunshine. It’s only in bright sunshine that you see that iridescent green on them.
It’s been a long, wet Winter here in the Pacific Northwest, and it doesn’t look like the rain is ready to leave quite yet. As you may have noticed, that’s meant a lack of bird pictures. Hopefully, that’s about to change, though, as we’ve had a couple of sunny days, allowing us to bird Belfair, and, more recently, the Port Townsend area.
Just because it’s sunny here in Tacoma doesn’t mean that it is necessarily going to be sunny where the birds are, though, as we found at our visit to Theler where we were greeted by fog
and a general lack of birds. Most of the birds we did see seemed more interested in finding food than in posing for pictures,
at least until we encountered this Pheasant
Along the trail. I assume he was probably raised locally since pheasants are uncommon here in Western Washington, and he seemed largely indifferent to the cameras pointed at his face.
My favorite picture from our morning walk at Belfair was this shot of a Spotted Towhee swallowing a berry.
It didn’t hurt that the sun had finally burned most of the fog off.
At other times, I might have been disappointed by how few birds we saw, but it felt great to walk four miles without getting rained on.
It’s easy to forget that this whole ChatGPT/“The Darkling Thrush” thing started with a simple nod of the head to McNulty’s Ascendance, a book that I could easily identify with, one that helped remind me how I feel about Nature, and the Olympics, in particular.
Originally, I was going to include a different second poem called Breath that ends with: “Timeless beauty and human grief/between these poles/the world’s suffering wakes anew/with each striking sunrise.”
However, after all the long-winded discussion following my comments on McNulty’s “Varied Thrush Calling in Autumn,” somehow it seems appropriate to circle back and mention this McNulty poem, which complements the one previously posted.
DECEPTION PASS BEFORE THE BOMBS FALL
Navy jets strafing the heavens,
the trees gather small intermittent silence
into themselves.
I walk out through wet winter brush.
I stop to listen to the story of a leaning cedar
as it folds its bark over an ancient burn.
Along charred heartwood
I feel the rough burnt edge of old bark,
the burgeoning growth of healthy sapwood,
as a fighter jet splits the sky.
Into the leaf’s-breadth of silence
that follows, a winter wren utters
Its clear, ebullient song.
Its notes pierce the darkness of war-noise
like a blossom of light, resplendent
with an ounce and a half of hope.
Although I’ve been in that area once or twice, I didn’t remember it clearly so I looked it up in Google: “Deception Pass State Park, Washington’s most visited state park, features accessible, stunning old-growth forests, particularly in the Hoypus Point and Hoypus Hill areas of Whidbey Island. These, sometimes 700-850+ year-old, Douglas-fir and cedar forests offer miles of hiking trails, providing a rare, low-elevation, and easily accessible glimpse into the region’s ancient, pre-settlement ecosystems.”
The Whidbey Island Naval Station is just south of the area. I’ve only driven by it once or twice, but I remember thinking the Naval Base seemed strangely out of place so near these old-growth forests.
The poem seems balanced on that incongruity – the stillness of the ancient forest blasted with the sound of jets taking off and landing.
Of course, it’s probably not literally true that “trees gather small intermittent silence/into themselves,” but they do block most noise, and the Pacific Northwest rainforests seem to do a particularly good job of doing that.
Perhaps that silence is what makes hiking in the forest so meditative and allows us to notice things we miss when we are distracted by the chatter going on in our heads. Luckily, I’ve never encountered the kind of jet noise McNulty describes here while hiking in PNW forests, but I’m often distracted by the sound of passenger jets flying over while hiking Mt. Rainier or other Cascade hikes. There seems to be no place where you can totally avoid human noise pollution.
Luckily, that cacophony doesn’t manage to entirely drown out the elegant Winter Wrens’ song, a song offering hope that man’s destruction won’t destroy Nature, that we, like the “leaning cedar as it folds its bark over an ancient burn,” will be able to restore what our bombs have destroyed.
Unfortunately, our current bombing of Iran barely leaves us “with an ounce and a half of hope.”
