In a Dark Time

When I was younger, I thought nothing about driving home non-stop from Ft. Irwin to Vancouver, WA. If I got too tired, I’d stop at a rest stop and snooze for an hour or so. At 84 I might still be able to do that, but now that I can easily afford a motel room, I prefer to spend two days traveling from Fresno to Tacoma. An added benefit is that we can stop and bird on the way home.

Of course, just because we can bird doesn’t mean that the birds will necessarily cooperate with us. On our recent trip, we stopped at The Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, but saw very few birds and didn’t manage to get a photo I thought worth sharing.

Our stop on the second day at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge was only fair, but we managed to get a few interesting photos, like this shot of a male Wood Duck who decided he didn’t want his picture taken.

This Common Yellowthroat seemed to think that the best strategy to avoid getting its picture taken was to stay at a distance and use reeds to make it difficult to focus on it.

I don’t think this American Bittern wanted its picture taken either, but it turned to camouflage and blending in with its surroundings to avoid being seen.

It almost worked as my Canon found it almost as difficult as I did to separate it from its surroundings.

The only bird that really seemed willing to have its picture taken was this female Red-Winged Blackbird. It was so close that I had trouble fitting it in the frame with my lens zoomed in as far as it would go.

The Ridgefield auto-tour was a nice ending to a two-week-long vacation.

As usual, we visited Jeff and Debbie for three days in Fresno on the way home from Arizona. We had a couple of enjoyable hikes and a trip to Kings Canyon. Though we weren’t really birding, per se, I usually carry my camera on walks and take pictures of birds we see. I certainly couldn’t resist taking this shot of a Mallard with her brood of ducklings.

On another walk, I managed to get a shot of this Tree Swallow

and this Western Kingbird, a bird I’m more apt to see in Bear River than in Fresno.

The highlight of the visit, though, didn’t include any birds at all. We visited Kings Canyon where you can count on seeing Giant Sequoias firmly attached to the ground year-round.

Birds are probably my favorite part of Nature, but they’re seldom as awe-inspiring as the forests they live in.

I’ve long wanted to visit The Salton Sea, a well-known winter sanctuary for birds. I also knew that visiting in June I wasn’t likely to see many birds, but we were driving by on our way from Goodyear to Fresno, and we didn’t need to be in Fresno until the next day. And I really wanted to see it. So.

The birding was definitely limited, but I’m still glad we stopped and talked to the State Rangers at the Park Headquarters. We discovered that the Salton Sea isn’t quite man-made, but it’s not a natural feature either. ChatGPT explains its origin more clearly than I can:

In 1905, engineers diverting water from the Colorado River for irrigation lost control of the river after heavy flooding. For nearly two years, the entire Colorado River poured into the Salton Sink because levees and diversion works failed. By the time the breach was finally closed in 1907, an enormous inland sea had formed.

Since then, the lake has survived not because it has a natural outlet or regular river inflow, but because it receives:

• Agricultural runoff from the surrounding irrigated farmland.
• Water from the New River and Alamo River, which carry irrigation drainage.

The bad news is that farmers who receive water from the Colorado River for their crops have had to agree to stop leakage from their irrigation system, which means that the sea is steadily receding and becoming more saline. Without steps to save it, it could well disappear within 20 years and disrupt wildlife migrations.

Hopefully, they/we will find a way to preserve part of the lake without endangering the migratory birds any more than we already do. It’s criminal to ignore the environmental damage our way of life has inflicted, but that awareness should also make us grateful for the wildlife that still shares our world.

In that spirit, we walked the beach where we were greeted by this Albert’s Towhee, a bird that looks a lot like a California Towhee but is quite dissimilar from the Spotted Towhee we have in the Pacific Northwest.

We saw several American Avocets

but not in the numbers we saw earlier in our trip or you could expect to see in the Spring migration.

We also saw this gull at Bear River, but I didn’t recognize it because I seldom see immature Bonaparte’s Gulls.

It was a treat seeing this Blue-winged Teal since they are rare in the Pacific Northwest, and it has been a couple of years since I’ve seen one in Colorado

It’s been even longer since I’ve seen a Redhead, so long that I didn’t know what it was until I could get back to my computer.

I doubt I would visit the Salton Sea again unless it’s during November through February when birds are migrating.

I started this record of our recent trip to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge with a shot of an American Avocet and a White-faced Ibis. If I had had a shot that included those two and a Black-necked Stilt, birds I call Tres Compadres because they are so often seen together. So, after featuring the other two, I thought I would end this review of our trip with some shots of the White-Faced Ibis.

I’ll have to admit that I usually end up presenting shots of White-faced Ibis last because I find them the hardest to edit. I shoot almost all my photos in RAW format because it gives me the best way to adjust colors. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know how to adjust shadows and whites in shots of White-faced Ibis so that the photo looks like what I actually saw.

I’m never really sure what I saw because the color of the plumage is never the same. ChatGPT offers this description of its color:

The White-faced Ibis is not actually white overall. Its body is predominantly a dark, glossy color that changes depending on the light.

Key coloration includes:

• Body: Deep chestnut-brown to dark reddish-brown.
• Wings and back: Iridescent, with metallic green, bronze, purple, and magenta highlights that shimmer in sunlight.
• Face (breeding season): A thin border of white feathers surrounds the bare reddish facial skin, giving the bird its common name.
• Eyes: Bright red in adults during the breeding season.
• Legs: Reddish to pinkish.

Outside the breeding season, the white border around the face becomes much less distinct or disappears, making the bird look darker overall.

So, although it’s called a “White-faced” Ibis, only the narrow facial border is white during breeding season. The rest of the bird is a rich, dark brown with a striking iridescent green and purple sheen.

To complicate matters, the birds like to feed in the reeds, which create their own irregular shadows. Even though I lightened this shot a little bit, the bright colors are barely noticeable. I’ll have to admit that because my glasses turn dark in bright sunlight, birds often seem darker than they really are.

This shot emphasizes the dark reddish chest, but I could have easily popped the colors so the chest stands out more than it does here, but that would have drawn attention away from that remarkable beak.

I “cheated” on this shot, lightening the subject and darkening the background because it was nearly white — certainly not the bluish color it appeared to be when I took this shot.

I really don’t like it when photographers “pop” the colors in scenics, making real-life experiences seem less powerful than they really are, but the more you work with photos, the more you learn that they are less realistic then they are representative.