This is a postscript to my previous notes on Steelhead Youth. Every year, the audio system in the fish ladder viewing area (Ballard Locks) broadcasts a series of oral histories, each relating to a particular cycle of salmon migration. Right now in April, when you press the red button, you’ll hear about the juvenile steelhead…
Steelhead Youth
Puget Sound steelhead travel through the Ballard Locks at a fraction of their glory-day numbers. According to this post at the Friends of the Ballard Locks blog, two to three thousand steelhead used to migrate through the locks. Now, if visitors see just one steelhead looking back at them through the window, they’re lucky. A…
Great Blue Squiggles
I guess it’s Composite Week, since this is my second Photoshop posting in a few days. We saw this Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias) fishing for sculpin (mostly) in a nearby Seattle marina. I’m always drawn to reflections of boat masts in smooth or rippled water, and I loved the way these particular reflections swirled…
Arc of the Kingfisher
I have a few terabytes of backlogged photos I’ve never posted — many of which should probably stay archived. But, I thought for sure I’d published this one. When I searched my blog archives, it appears this image never touched the pages of The Quark. This is a banner I created last year of a…
Cool & Totipalmate
It begins with a twig in the bill and the throaty croak of the swamp. They’re creatures of the marshes, the Great Blues, now on ascent to a season in the trees where nests incubate eggs, and where clumsy young legs will soon dawdle on branches until they get their wings. They call this place…
Bird Photography Outtakes
Double-crested Cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus) in Seattle, Washington. Okay, I’m pretty careful when I’m photographing around roosts. And, cormorants give you plenty of warning with all of the guano splatters below their perches. In fact, I can’t think of the last time I got hit by a big bird … so, it’s funny that on the…
Say It’s Only a Cormorant Moon …
… sailing over a cardboard sea. The sun came out and I raced down to the locks where, just a few days before, I’d seen the most perfect light on alighting herons. There’s a rookery that spans a ravine, the northern terminus of which is at the Ballard Locks. Several Great Blue Heron couples (Ardea…
Too Much House, But Still Some Goose
In 1905, the Duwamish native Cheshiahud told The Seattle Times that he could no longer catch trout in Lake Union because “too much house now — they all gone.” 1. Seattle’s city-central lake was then known to the Duwamish as meman harsh, or “little lake,” surrounded by marshes and streams that fed both the lake…
How Do You Feel About Wing Tags?
Edited 4/4/12 to add: I got a note from the biologist associated with this study, who gave me some background on the hawk pictured here. It’s a juvenile female who was tagged last August 2011 at SeaTac Airport. She — along with the other hawks who are trapped and tagged — was taken up to…
From the Primordial Soup of Lake Union: American Coots
American Coots creep out of lakes like creatures of the bog, drawing up mud with their lobed toes as they march, single file, from the water to their feeding grounds. I once watched hundreds emerge, one by one, from the low-tide flats at San Leandro Marina in California, forming a line of black baubles from…
