I’m not sure if it’s still Winter here in the Pacific Northwest, or whether Spring has finally sprung. It’s still raining enough that it is definitely hard to plan a day out birding ahead of time. I’ve only managed to get out once since our trip to Port Townsend, and it wasn’t a great birding day.
Spotting this beautiful male Green-Winged Teal was definitely the birding highlight of the day.
Luckily, it has warmed up enough that the currants were nearly in full bloom,
Oregon grapes were flowering,
and Skunk Cabbage was found throughout the wetlands.
It’s hard to be disappointed even by a lack of birds when there is so much natural beauty finally reappearing.
Being a creature of habit, I start my trip to Port Townsend with a birding stop at Ft. Flagler, fish and chips at Sea J’s Cafe, a tour of the art galleries, particularly the two Co-ops, and a final birding stop at Ft. Worden where we often see birds that we haven’t seen at Ft. Flagler.
On this trip, I managed to get some good shots of what turned out to be not one but two different Belted Kingfishers. We’ve seen Kingfishers here many times in the past, but they like to laugh and fly away before your camera can focus on them. On this trip, though, this one landed right under me and sat there as I leaned over the railing in several different places trying to get the perfect angle.
After I’d taken a dozen or so shots, though, I was distracted by a river otter diving right below the Kingfisher.
The Kingfisher flew away by the time I grew frustrated with trying to capture a shot of the otter’s head. As we headed back to the car a Kingfisher flew back overhead and landed a few feet away from where the earlier Kingfisher had been. I assumed it was the same Kingfisher.
I didn’t realize otherwise until I got home and uploaded my shots to my computer that I realized this was a male Belted Kingfisher. The reason they had completely ignored me was that it must be mating season
I was easy to spot Black-bellied Plovers and Sanderlings at Fort Flagler, but I might not have noticed the Turnstones if Leslie hadn’t spotted them first with her binoculars. I started looking for them, and a few minutes later I spotted this one foraging right next to a Sanderling.
This one stood out more than the others I spotted because the water provided a background, but several of the shots I took were blurry because my Canon EOS R5 focused on the rocks instead of the bird.
I managed to focus on another one as it ran across the wet sand before reaching the rocky stretch of beach where it finds food.
I enjoyed seeing all these different varieties of seabirds, but I began to worry that we hadn’t seen a single Harlequin duck until we reached the very end of the spit.
I’ve noted before that I don’t chase rare sightings, that I prefer to visit refuges or special places where you can see all kinds of wildlife, but a skeptic could argue that I do chase Harlequin ducks, and the only place I can count on seeing them is Fort Flagler. I’ve been going there for years, trying to capture the perfect Harlequin shot.
I’m afraid I’m going to have to go back again next year because these shots aren’t even as good as some I have taken in past years, because they were as long ways off shore. These shots have all been heavily cropped, even though I shot them with a 200mm-800mm zoom lens.
Even worse, I continue to struggle to avoid blown-out highlights and am forced to tone down the whites and highlights to show some of the detail in the white feathers.
These might be considered better than some shots I’ve taken in the past. If so, it is probably because my equipment has gotten better and better (and more and more expensive) over time. Not to mention that photographic software allows more precise adjustments than when I started birding.
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.
