I spotted my first migratory ducks on the urban shores of Elliott Bay last week. The new arrivals are on edge — wary and easy to flush. Lifting my lens is enough to send them skittering to the middle of the bay, and I can only imagine what sights and sounds have jarred them into…
The Sandpiper Trail at Grays Harbor NWR
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…
Birds Flying High … You Know How I Feel
[My homage to Nina Simone, in the form of blurred wings and texturized Dunlins.] When thousands of shorebirds frolic on the mire, their wingbeats rattle like seashells strung in the wind … just the lightest of chimes, near silent except for the rush of air over 15,000 pairs of wings. They become a coil, spiraling…
A Sneeuwuil By Any Other Name
Sneeuwuil – Dutch Le Harfang des neiges – French Sniega puce – Latvian Snøugle – Norwegian Wabagano – Cree Shirofukuro – Japanese ~ Many thanks to Paul Asimow’s Snowy Owl pages for the above excerpt. We don’t yet know if it’s an echo year for Snowy Owls (the year after an irruption), but the Bubo…
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…
