Month: July 2013

Although my first morning at Malheur started off rather bleakly, the birding suddenly got interesting when I spotted this Great Horned Owl across the creek being pestered by two Red-Wing Blackbirds.

It was clear that he was ignoring them and seemed nearly as indifferent to me when he stared right at me.

Unfortunately, the photos are not nearly as sharp as they should have been at that distance, but, considering the ISO was at 12800, they seem remarkably good shots.

Although the light had improved somewhat by the time I saw a second Great Horned Owl down the road,

the light was still so low that the shots of it in flight weren’t worth keeping. It seems to be one of the unwritten Laws of Wildlife Photography that you get your best sightings on the cloudiest days when it’s nearly impossible to get top-quality shots, no matter how good the equipment you’re using.

That Law was followed all the way to the end of the road. I had the pleasure of seeing two birds I’ve never seen before, but the light was poor enough that I wasn’t sure what this bird was until I had adjusted it with Aperture and Photoshop. It turned out to be what I thought it was, a Yellow-Breasted Chat, a rarely seen bird.

I also saw my first-ever Bobolink,

which I would have probably missed if two visitors hadn’t told me that they were in this field. In fact, I’m pretty sure I would have dismissed them as Red-Wing Blackbirds without forewarning.

By the end of the morning I’d convinced myself that no matter what the weather was like I would have to stay another day to get better shots of these birds. That, plus the fact I was really enjoying myself no matter how bad the weather or how bad the night before was. For me, weather is as much a state of mind as a meteorological condition.

My first night at Malheur was almost nightmarish. I was woken up at about 2 AM when the main flap on my tent had blown open. I could never figure out how the wind could’ve possibly blown two zippers wide open. I had a hard time getting back to sleep because the car kept shuddering in the high winds. As I lay there wide-awake, I was grateful I wasn’t a bird out in those conditions. By morning the high winds had subsided, but there were low clouds and a steady drizzle. Not the weather I had expected.

Out birding early the next morning, I didn’t recognize what this bird was when I first saw it.

Despite its “blast-beruffled plume,” it greeted the morn with its beautiful Meadowlark song. Hopefully any potential mates judged it by its vocal ability, not its looks that bleak morning.

This young buck also looked a lot like I felt when I had to crawl out of my car at 2 AM in the morning to zip up my tent.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have a warm sleeping bag to crawl back into and had to wait for the morning sun to dry out.

The dark clouds made it difficult to get good shots of anything that wasn’t quite close, but I liked this undeniable silhouette of a White-Faced Ibis flying in the distance.

The scarcity of birds had me looking hard for subjects, or I doubt I would have noticed what I think is a little Willow Flycatcher hopping around on the ground under the Willows.

I had to remind myself that my worst day at Malheur is better than my best day gazing into my computer. Luckily, the trip steadily improved after its disastrous start, starting later that morning even before the sun finally began to break through the clouds.

After I cut my early summer trip to Malheur short because of the sub-freezing night temperatures, I promised myself I would return when the temperatures warmed up enough that I could car camp. I figured by mid-June that it should be toasty and dry in the Eastern Oregon high desert. Turns out I was wrong, once again. I brought rain, cool temperatures, and high winds with me from the Puget Sound, making me question whether I’d made the right decision in not returning to Seabeck instead.

The winds were so strong when I arrived around 4 PM that birding was barely mediocre as most birds were hunkered down avoiding the high winds. Luckily, that wasn’t true of all birds, as these Forster’s Terns seemed to enjoy riding the high winds, stopping mid-air and diving for the fish below.

I often see them in the winter in the Puget Sound area but seldom manage to get as close as I did in Malheur. I loved the challenge of photographing these birds in flight because you only got a second or two as they hovered before diving.

I think the high winds actually made photographing them easier because they seemed to almost stall in the wind just before diving.

This is the first time I’ve ever managed to actually see the tail feathers, which seemed to be built for speed.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid it would require someone with considerably faster reflexes than me to manage to get a shot of them actually diving into the water and catching a fish, though I had several opportunities to do so.