I’m busy updating the November-December calendar for the Tahoma Audubon society, but I wanted to post a quick picture from my recent three day visit to Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon.
Hopefully I’ll finish the calendar today and start posting some of the shots from the trip Sunday.
I was quite surprised that the last leg of my Thursday trip to the beach was the most rewarding part of the trip. Tokeland usually isn’t my favorite place to bird as there’s little to do than stand on the dock or short causeway looking for birds, usually the resident Marbled Godwits. I much prefer Bottle Beach, particularly when no one else is there.
Still, the Marbled Godwits are beautiful birds and I love this shot of several standing on the top of a piling.
I thought that this might actually be the best shot of the day. I particularly like that toe hanging over the edge, subtly suggesting it might be a little crowded on that post.
I also got my first shot of the Bar-Tailed Godwit that local birders have been tweeting about for much of the last month.
It’s a rarity around here since it’s generally only found in Alaska. I was glad to finally see it, but it’s obvious at moments like this that I’m not a birder at heart, as I wasn’t particularly elated at seeing it. The photographer in me, however, was irritated that I couldn’t get a shot of it doing more than just standing, even though I waited around nearly a half hour something to happen.
No, the real thrill of the day for me, though other birders didn’t seem too interested, was watching wave after wave of cormorants fly by the dock.
There were hundreds, if not thousands of them, that flew by as I stood at the dock for a rather short period of time. I was absolutely dumbstruck. Since they’re year-round residents in the Puget Sound I’d never really thought of them migrating, though apparently some varieties do.
As I headed south I saw more Cormorants in Willapa Bay, but I was really struck by the huge number of brown, nondescript ducks lining the shores of the bay. Unfortunately there really wasn’t a good place to pull off the highway, and I knew that even if I did pull over a picture would do nothing to convey the sense of bounty I felt as I drove along. For a short time I could almost deceive myself into believing that all is right with the world and that man and nature are still in balance.
I felt so good at the end of the drive that before turning back for home I stopped at the local Dairy Queen and splurged on, not one, but two Coney Dogs with cheese, damn the high cholesterol ratings on the annual physical. Life’s good.
Thursday just as I was about to accept the fact that it wasn’t going to ever clear up and I ought to leave, it started to clear up and I was able to get shots of the numerous Black-Bellied Plovers,
without their name-sake black bellies because they are in non-breeding colors this time of year. Perhaps that’s why they came so close this time, much closer than I’ve ever managed to get when they were in breeding colors.
I also managed to get several shots of what appeared to be Sanderlings,
a bird I’ve never managed to get a shot of before, though I don’t think this is the first time I’ve ever seen them.
There were also a lot of these small birds, what I think are Western Sandpipers,
though I still find it difficult to differentiate between the many varieties of the sandpiper family particularly when they’re not in breeding colors.
I was pleasantly surprised when a small flock of Marbled Godwits joined the much larger flock of Black-Bellied Plovers.
I’m used to seeing them at Tokeland, but I’ve never seen them at Bottle Beach before.
I suppose I could have been disappointed by standing around in the fog for three hours, but the last half hour of sunshine seemed to completely dispel my earlier frustration.
There were no new sightings and the birds weren’t as colorful as they are during breeding season, but it was a delightful way to spend three and a half hours, alone in the mist as nature closed in around me.
Although this week was mostly sunny, a number of obligations kept me from getting out and going birding on my normal days. Finally, in desperation I skipped my Thursday Tai Chi and Pilates classes to drive to the coast. It was a beautiful, sunny drive the whole way, at least until I got within three miles of my destination, when fog obscured the sky. If it had been summer I would have expected fog, but since it was relatively cool in Tacoma I was more than a little surprised that the fog was so thick:
As usual, I was early, there long before the tide was to come in bringing the shorebirds with it. But that gave me a chance to be alone in the delightful quiet and watch the seagulls, which seem ever-present.
I had no trouble recognizing this common Ring-billed Gull,
though, I had no idea what this big gull was and was pretty sure I’d never seen one before, which turned out to be half true. I couldn’t tell if it was a young Western Gull or a young Glaucous-Winged Gull,
though it looks very little like what I think is an adult Western Gull,
which looks quite a bit like this gull, except for the grey-breast. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any bird with this color breast in any of my birding books, even in Sibley, which provides the best illustrations of variations within different species.
However, I did find one passage that may well explain my confusion in a section on Gull Hybrids:
GLAUCOUS-WINGED – WESTERN GULL. Common coastally from British Columbia to California. Some populations in Washington are mostly hybrids and backcrosses, with very few pure birds.
That was one of those AHA moments. This is definitely one of those times when the more I know the more I realize how little I know. I’ve never read this anywhere before. I wonder if this means that I’ve been rash in previous identifications based on the assumption that a gull has to be one species or another.
Probably. As I’ve said numerous times, I’m a better photographer than a birder.