At the height of Bald Eagle season in Rockport and Marblemount, along the Skagit River, you’ll see dozens of eagles, lumbering across the sand bars, dragging and pillaging salmon carcasses. I like to say that birds like pigeons have jodhpurs — with flared plumes tapering into claws. Eagles, on the other hand, look like they’re…
Home is Where the Cell Tower Is
Sequestered indoors for the rain, I’ve been sorting through my photo archives, hoping to cull my duds, once and for all. I came upon my gallery of Osprey shots … taken this summer as I checked in occasionally with a local nesting couple. These two never did not appear to produce any young, but there…
Barring the Hat
My first wild encounter with a Barred Owl in Seattle culminated in the photo below. Based on this experience, my advice to children in raptor territory is: avoid wearing plush toy animals on your backpack as the dusk hunting hour approaches. A boy was walking along a wooded path with his mother, a fuzzy toy…
Climbing the [Salmon] Ladder to Success
Images taken at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, aka Ballard Locks, in Seattle Washington. Summer means salmon runs at the Ballard Locks fish ladder . . . twenty-one watery steps from Puget Sound, to the ship canal, to the fresh water spawning grounds where the returning salmon were born. Salmon are a miracle of navigational skills,…
And Osprey Makes Two
So far, that’s all I’ve seen at this nesting site . . . two diligent Osprey, bringing each other fish and taking turns sitting. The structure of the cell phone tower obscures the interior of the nest, so I see only what happens on the rafters outside. To date, it’s been just a male and…
Eagle & Crow
There’s no lack of courage among the black birds. (Exhibit B: the eagle/crow face off I photographed last October.) I joke that Bald Eagles in Seattle are never without a personal entourage, usually crows and gulls. In this particular altercation, a Red-winged Blackbird joined the squadron as the eagle flew over Union Bay Natural Area…
Anthropomorphizing a Caspian-Peregrine Tussle
I’ve been grabbing Seattle’s ever-so-fleeting sun breaks to photograph a group of Caspian Terns who fish every evening on Puget Sound. I’ll post those shots soon. As I was packing up my tripod tonight, I saw the telltale movement and wing shape of a Peregrine overhead. She was riding the thermals up and out of…
No Dropped Calls
This Osprey doesn’t have to worry about mobile phone dead zones at home — nesting, as he is, at the top of a cell tower. Osprey love the tall platforms of human invention, but the settings can take their toll, too — in the form of power outages, or even electrical harm to the birds….
Bald Eagle in the Backyard
This is a huge bonus of living in Seattle: the urban and suburban wildlife includes a multitude of Bald Eagles. This morning, Hugh went into our friends’ garden to fill up their bird feeder — a chore we both kind of enjoy. A huge contingent of birds descends right when our boots leave the scene…
Dine Like an Eagle
We came upon this scene on a Seattle area beach . . . a small stretch of private community beach where we have a pass. Planted on the pebbles, way far away, too far for my 70-300mm lens, we watched as this Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) wrangled with a second eagle, a group of crows,…
