Category: Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge

We didn’t get to see the baby Grebes, Avocet chicks, or Black-necked Stilt chicks we went to Bear River to see, but we did see a lot of ducklings, like this (I think) Gadwall and her brood,  

lots and lots of Canada Goose goslings (this is my favorite shot of far too many),

and, most exciting of all, this Long-billed Curlew chick as we were leaving the refuge.

I had to take the shot through the windshield so the picture is blurrier than I’d like, but I’ve never seen one before so I’ll keep this shot until I get a better one.  The only reason I’m sure it is a Curlew chick is that the parent nearly flew through our windshield as this little guy ran down the road right in front of our very slow-moving car (not a survival strategy I’d suggest for other Curlew Chicks, by the way}.

I’d love to say that I got this shot of the parent as it tried to distract us,

but that would be a lie. I was so focused on the chick and the whole thing happened so fast with the parent flying back and forth and up and down that I couldn’t manage to get a single shot.  This shot was taken further down the road when we spotted a couple of Curlew and they, too, circled us protesting very loudly.  There might very well have been chicks nearby, but I wasn’t going to stop in the middle of the highway long enough to find them.

Since we never plan a trip just to Bear River (it’s a stop on the way to seeing Tyson’s family in Colorado), we never quite know what to expect when we get there, but we’re seldom disappointed (except the late-summer visit when there were way more mosquitoes than there were birds).

Ending this visit with the first-ever sighting of a Curlew chick made it a memorable visit.

Cinnamon Teal wasn’t the only species that was more numerous than usual at Bear River.  Though we have seen terns on previous visits, they were more active than they have ever been when we’ve been here before. Leslie wanted me to get some shots of them, but that’s a lot easier said than done, especially using the 500mm lens with doubler mounted on the window sill. 

The only way that setup would work was to set a high shutter speed and try to get shots in the distance.  I got some shots that I liked, but these first shots are heavily cropped.

I liked how this shot revealed the tern’s aeronautic design.

I’m not sure if these are Common Terns or Forster’s Terns. but  Merlin identified it as a Forster’s Tern and since marshes are their common habitat, I am going to go with that identification.  The Audubon society notes, though, that the two are so similar that Audubon and others first considered them the same species.  It’s not surprising that I had a lot of trouble deciding what they were.

The birder in me may want to know what their name is, but when I was there their names seemed irrelevant.  I simply admired their amazing speed and their ability to catch fish 

by plunging full speed into the pond.

Occasionally I would even get lucky and get a shot like this that seems remarkably clear despite being heavily cropped.  

However, I ended up getting the best shots with the Canon EOS R5 that Leslie was using most of the time.  Even with a 600 mm lens, it’s light enough to handhold.  These last three shots required very little cropping because the terns were much closer.

I had hoped that one of the terns would be facing us while hovering, but this was the best shot I could get of one hovering, the easiest time to get a shot of them.

Except for the wing tip being out of frame, this was my favorite shot of the day. That’s probably because I’ve learned the hard way that it’s difficult to capture a closeup of a flying tern.

In fact, if your goal is simply to get a clear shot of a Forster Tern, your surest bet is to get a shot of one standing on the shore.

Unfortunately, this kind of shot doesn’t capture the tern’s most remarkable trait — their speed. 

Perhaps to do that I should have included the many shots where unrecognizable parts of the terns disappear off the edges of the frame.

An old saying comes to mind when I look back at our latest trip to Bear River: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” As a gardener, I used to think that saying only applied to my garden where areas I had just weeded would immediately be covered in new weeds. However, it took on a more pleasant connotation when the missing American Avocets, Black-necked Stilts, and Grebes were replaced by large numbers of birds we had rarely seen there, more than ready to take advantage of the wetlands.

One of my favorite of those was the Cinnamon Teal.  We were greeted by a pair of very raucous male Cinnamon Teal in the fields before we got to the refuge.  I assumed they were squabbling over territory since it was near breeding season.  

We were then greeted near the gate by a single male Cinnamon Teal in the pond next to the gate.  

I began to question my original premise that males would become territorial this time of year since the opposite seemed to be much more common since most of my shots actually showed pairs or small flocks of male Cinnamon Teal hanging out together.

We only saw a single pair

and they didn’t seem any rush to nest. I was curious about when Cinnamon Teal nest, but the only information I could find online was that they nest “at different times in different areas,” which didn’t really answer my questions.

Thankfully, it’s easy to admire their beauty even when you don’t know much about them, and that’s often the first step in learning about their lives.

My all-time favorite shots at Bear River may be pictures of Avocet chicks, but a close second would have to be pictures of Grebe chicks riding on their parent’s back.  We didn’t see any of those on this trip, either, though we saw grebes throughout the refuge. 

Bear River is the first place I ever saw a Clark’s Grebe and didn’t realize it wasn’t a Western Grebe until I put the shots up on my computer screen. Now, though the hairline is a distinctive difference; the dark cap usually doesn’t surround the eye.  In addition, the orange beak is quite different from the Western Grebe’s yellow beak.

Though they look remarkably similar in the wild, seeing them posted together like this helps me to clearly distinguish the two.

Of course, once you think you’ve got the difference mastered you see one like this that seems like a hybrid Western/Clark’s, which I’ve never seen before but does seem to exist.

Another unexpected sighting was this Eared Grebe not yet in full breeding plumage, a first for me at Bear River.

Luckily we were too busy just taking shots of the many birds we did see to be disappointed by the birds we didn’t see. 

If I had driven 600+ miles to just see Avocet or Grebe chicks I would have been depressed by our trip, but, since I don’t chase particular birds and visit places that make me feel alive, I always end up enjoying the places I visit — unless there are too many mosquitoes visiting at the same time.