One of my favorite Winter visitors is the Varied Thrush. I leave all the leaves in my beds mainly to attract them (and Towhees, and Juncos, and any other bird that needs bugs). I began to worry that I wasn’t going to see any this year when I hadn’t seen one all the way through January, but we’ve had two regular visitors most of February.
They’re hard to get good shots of since they’re shy and will leave the yard immediately if you open the door and because they spend most of their time in the shade. Still, if you’re patient enough and lucky enough, one will fly up to the nearest hydrangea instead of over the fence, like this female Varied Thrush.
Sometimes if they are foraging through the bed by the back fence they’re a little bolder, but then you have to crop the photo heavily.
Until I actually put all the shots up on my monitor I thought it was just a single thrush that was visiting us, the female showed above. I was wrong, though, as this is definitely a male Varied Thrush
and so is this one.
It seems silly that such a little bird can bring some so much pleasure to an otherwise gray day, but whenever I see a Varied Thrush scratching through the leaves on the flower beds it makes me think that all the work we’ve put into transforming our grass into flower beds was more than worth the effort.
On July 28, 2013, Leslie and I hiked Mt. Rainier with her friend Hao from China. I was so exhausted from keeping up with them on that hike that I resolved to lose 30 pounds so that I could continue to hike the Cascades. I lost that weight by changing my diet and have continued to lose weight, but a recent snowshoeing trip on Rainier convinced me that I’ve lost too much muscle and need to rebuild it, even if it means gaining some weight.
We bought new snowshoes for Christmas and new all-weather tires for the RAV-4, and that has been enough to get us to snowshoe once a week for the last five weeks. One of our first treks was from Narada Falls to Reflection Lake, well, if we had actually gotten to Reflection Lake.
This was also our first snowshoes on Mt. Rainier several years ago, so I thought it would be doable, and with considerable huffing-and-puffing on my part, we did make it to the highway that serves as a snowshoe trail in the winter.
Unfortunately, the usual trail/highway was closed because of high avalanche danger. We would have to add another mile and several hundred feet elevation gain to make it to the lake using the detour route. I had to tell Leslie and Paul I wasn’t up to doing it and that it was time to turn back. I had to settle for this shot of Mt. Rainier.
Not being able to make it to our intended destination really frustrated me. I knew that I had lost a lot of muscle since we had quit going to the YMCA during the Covid 19 quarantine, but I didn’t realize how much it had affected me until this trip. Luckily, we also rejoined the YMCA in January, so I started walking further and hitting the rowing machine and weight machines harder. The gate was closed at Longmire on our next trip, so we ended up doing a snowshoe at a lower altitude, and I didn’t have any problems on that trip.
On our fourth week we attempted the Narada Falls/Reflection Trek again. This time I wore lighter boots and left my camera gear, except for my iPhone, home. We realized that the road was open to the lake when we saw other skiers coming from the other side.
The view at the “lake” was a little disappointing because there was nothing but a big snowfield, but I was elated that I had actually made it there without feeling totally exhausted.
This shot of Pinnacle Peak and The Castle across from the lake made the trip worthwhile,
and this view of Rainier on our way back was the frosting on the cakes, so to speak.
If you need to train hard, I can’t imagine a better place to do it than around Mt. Rainier. Once you’ve caught your breath and straightened back up, the surrounding beauty makes you forget the pain of overexertion.
Luckily, Leslie and I get out much more often than my blog would indicate. Sometimes it’s so cloudy or the birds I get pictures of are ones I’ve shown so often that I can’t get inspired to spend the time deciding which to post or the time to refine them. Even with more rain than usual, we generally manage to get out to Theler Wetlands in Belfair and the Port Townsend Marina once a week.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, sunny days quite often start with heavy fog, and, unfortunately, early morning is the best time to see birds. Here’s what Theler Wetlands looked like on a recent morning.
Under these conditions, you’re lucky to see any birds, and when you do it’s hard to recognize what you’re seeing unless you’ve learned to identify birds from their profile, like this female Bufflehead that floated out of the sky to give us a look.
A small consolation is that you can often get closer to birds than you would ever get on a bright, sunny day. This Mourning Dove was so close and so unconcerned that I had a hard time fitting it in the frame.
When it’s foggy I have to look harder to find something to photograph. On a recent trip it was this Hair Ice, also known as Frost Beard, which we have probably overlooked for several years but became fascinated with once we really looked at it. It looks so bright because the sun had begun to break through, and, more importantly, it was close enough that the fog didn’t interfere with the light.
Leslie spotted it again in several places after we read up on it, but it seems to have totally disappeared on yesterday’s visit.
Fog or no fog, any winter day here in the Pacific Northwest without rain is a good day. And heck, if you’re willing to wait an hour or so, the fog might finally clear and you’ll be able to see birds you missed on the first half of the walk.
Birding, like fishing, is unpredictable, which can be either frustrating or exciting, depending on how you view it. As I noted here in 2002, I loved fishing with my dad as a kid, so, it’s probably not surprising that birding is exciting, not frustrating, for me. If you don’t see the Harlequin you were hoping/expecting to see, keep looking and you might see something equally exciting.
On this weekend, that was the Red-breasted Merganser. I only saw two at Fort Flagler and they were both a long ways offshore, so far I could barely see them without my 840 mm telephoto lens, and, even then, this shot is heavily cropped. Still, it’s impossible to miss that dramatic hairdo.
This shot of a male Red-breasted Merganser with a large Sole taken a few miles down the road at Mystery Bay State Park would have been the shot of the day if it hadn’t been for the green reflections in the water.
I was pleasantly surprised to be greeted by two male Red-Breasted Mergansers when we visited the Marine Center at Fort Worden.
It was a little disappointing that the two males never came closer even though I waited several minutes for them to come closer, but I was pleasantly surprised when three female Red-Breasted Mergansers swam right up to Marine Center dock where we were standing.
This female sat on the beach nearby preening herself
before rejoining the others and swimming right under us as they left, so close that I could never get all three females in the frame.
It would seem ungrateful to complain about not seeing as many Harlequins as I had hoped to see when I saw so many Red-breasted Mergansers, a bird I seldom see around Tacoma.
