Month: June 2008
It Could’ve Been a Bad Day
Thursday I had a dental appointment in Vancouver to have a old crown removed and preparation for a new crown that I wasn’t looking forward to. There’s nothing like several shots in the mouth and an hour and a half in the dentist’s chair to make your day uncomfortable, though it still seems preferable to a bad toothache.
Leslie came along because she wanted to have dinner with her nephew who goes to Reed College in Portland. And, of course, I wanted to visit the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge. At least no one can accuse us of not maximizing our use of gasoline.
When I arrived for my dental appointment it was dark and dreary with threatening clouds hanging overhead. Amazingly when I came out nearly two hours later the clouds were burning away and by the time I got to Ridgefield it was as sunny as I’ve seen since I left Colorado a week ago.
The first thing we saw when we entered the refuge was a Great Egret (I think) foraging in a pond right next to the road. It’s the first one I’ve managed to get a picture of this year:
Perhaps not surprisingly, I also saw a Yellow-Headed Blackbird, the first time I’ve ever managed to see one at Ridgefield, a bird listed as rare in Western Washington, though there seems to have been a colony at Ridgefield the last few years. I have little doubt I would never have seen it if I hadn’t just seen one in Colorado last week.
Perhaps the hit of the day, though, was this little barn swallow who had built her nest inside the observation shelter and waited impatiently on the railing waiting for us to leave so that she could feed her very noisy chicks:
We ended our visit with a 1.5 mile walk, but then had to hurry to make our dinner appointment. Leslie bought us all a New Orleans’ style dinner that almost made the dental work bearable, or, a the very least, forgettable.
More Birds of Colorado
A real bonus of birding is that it adds new interest to familiar places. I’ve been going to Colorado for at least five years now, but I keep finding new birds I’ve never seen before. Last Friday Jen had to babysit four other kids, so I decided that would be a good time to go for a long walk.
Despite my sunburn, it might have been the best birding day I’ve had in years. I managed to find a Magpie nest, even though I never managed to get the shot of a Magpie that I was aiming for.
I suspected the magpie was more cautious than usual because of the proximity to her nest, though it may just have been because she was too busy feeding an emerging brood to stop for rest. At first I was puzzled by this shot, but when I returned two days later I realized that all the birds had left the nest. So she was feeding this one who’d already left the nest.
On Sunday, Logan and I discovered a baby Mourning Dove resting on the rail, the closest I’d ever been to one
while his mommy watched from a nearby tree.
Though I’ve never gotten a picture of either a Magpie or Mourning Dove, I have seen them several times in the past. The same can’t be said for my sighting of a rather common Western Meadowlark,
and an even rarer, at least here in the West, Yellow-Headed Blackbird.
Remarkably, this is only a small sample of the many birds I saw while walking the Openspace area near Tyson and Jen’s home.
Ouzel Falls, Rocky Mountain National Park
I’ve been generally frustrated with scenics, which never seem nearly as impressive as the original when flattened and reduced to 81/2 x 11. Worse, the camera seems unable to capture the wide range of shades the eyes perceives easily, with trees fading into shadow and water reduced to a glaring white. More often than not, I just give up and trash the photos. At the very least, I turn to Photoshop in an attempt to recapture a little of the beauty I perceived as I walked the trail to Ouzel Falls in the Rocky Mountain National Park.
Perhaps you will appreciate the beauty of this place if you get on the treadmill for an hour before stopping to look at my photos. Then you might appreciate the fact that the early part of the trail parallels the stream up the mountain,
crosses it once,
again
and still again
steadily climbing to Ouzel Falls and the lake beyond, which is a easily attainable if you’re not hiking with three hikers under five, or you’re in good enough shape to carry all of them that far and back out.