Last month, Hugh and I took a spontaneous and soggy photo walk through Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge in Hoquiam, Washington. For a few weeks at the end of April and beginning of May, hundreds of thousands of migrating sandpipers, Dunlins, plovers, dowitchers and Red Knots feed and rest on the Refuge’s mud flats and…
Something Spawning This Way Comes
Last year at this time, I wrote about the salmon journeying upstream to their Washington spawning grounds: Salmon are a miracle of navigational skills, sometimes migrating thousands of miles during their years in the ocean, possibly guided by magnestism in the same way homing pigeons navigate with help of the earth’s magnetic fields. Then, salmon…
Swifty Monroe
It doesn’t just happen in Monroe … but we took a spontaneous trip to Monroe where it does happen. Vaux’s Swifts, up and down their migration corridor, appropriate chimneys for their nightly roosting ritual. In the Bay Area, the Healdsburg swift event was one of those things I’d always meant to attend but never did….
Welcome Home, Sockeye
I remember, I remember the hollowed nest in stream of stars the size of my eyes, I remember the swell of water, shape of light, celestial order to mirror the song of the river, the constellations … ~ From Celestial Navigation by Judith Roche I wrote about Judith Roche’s Salmon Suite poetry project at the…
