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Week Thirty-six, November 19-25
Sunday, November 25, 2001
This was a travel day for Natalie and I, as we made our way back home after our extended visit in Longview. So, under gray skies we battled the thick traffic and drove the 120 odd miles home.It's good to be back. The animals seemed relieved to have us return. And though it was too dark for there to be birds out feeding in the yard, I took the time this evening to refill the bird feeders in the rain. But there was no real opportunity today to take a decent photo...
Saturday, November 24, 2001
Roll on Columbia! Natalie and I spent a couple of hours on our state's best-known river today, wandering around and watching birds with her dad from his 30-plus-foot motorboat. The birds were mostly somewhere else today. Of course, we saw great blue herons, cormorants, gulls and a couple of bald eagles, but the variety and number of birds was pretty limited. We made the most of the trip though, exploring around some of the nooks and crannies of the small sloughs and islands. The whole time we were on the river I was wondering how different our boat trip would be if the Columbia River was still a free flowing river? Surely it would look different, feel different, even have different levels of birds and wildlife on its lower reaches than it has today, when it is more a series of carefully managed lakes rather than a river. It is hard to imagine what the Columbia looked like before the dams...
As we motored in the waters of the Columbia, I kept an eye on the horizon, because even though it was cloudy, the clouds were high enough to allow a good view of the snow-capped crater of Mt. St. Helens. I snapped today's photo as we returned to the Longview Yacht Club and the boathouse where Natalie's dad keeps his boat.
Friday, November 23, 2001
It was great to hear coyotes howling in the hills around Natalie's parents' place here in Longview, Wash., tonight. Those sounds of the wild just can't be replaced with the sounds of passing trains or police and fire sirens in the city.
Believe it or not, I didn't get outside that much today. Even though I am away from the home office, I still had work to do. We wandered out to the little town of Kalama, to look around in a Christmas shop, and then stopped by a paperback book store here in Longview, where for the first time Natalie and I saw copies of our book Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula on sale on the shelves for the first time.
Today's photo was actually taken yesterday afternoon, of leaves that had fallen off the sweet gum tree in the back yard here.
Thursday, November 22, 2001
Happy Thanksgiving to all of those in the U.S. This day started dark and very wet, but once the low pressure that was predicted to bring in winds this morning fizzled out, the weather evened out to gray and drizzly. Uneventful.
I took a break from the food preparation and eating to step out into the back yard here in Longview and take a look at the state of things. Fallen leaves cover the grass, the clay-caked soil is overloaded with water and droplets hang from the trees, from the moss, and from the needles of an ornamental pine that Natalie's father has growing in a wine barrel on the patio. Since I am drawn to photos of raindrops, I had to snap the photo above of the drop hanging from the end of a pine needle.
Wednesday, November 21, 2001
On this day that is a travel day for Natalie and I were able to fit in an afternoon walk and drive along Ruston Way for some rainy bird watching. We ventured down there after I read on a Tweeters mailing list that there has been an albino loon hanging out along the shore, and while we didn't see the loon in the mist, we did find that the barrow's goldeneyes, shown in the photo above, are in the area now. We also watched an adult surf scoter bobbing on the water's surface near a long line of gulls that had flocked together in anticipation of a storm.
It threatened to be very stormy in Tacoma tonight. As we left town my barometer had fallen sharply down to 29.40 and it was still dropping, and there were predictions of wind gusts up to 60 miles an hour tomorrow.
One thing I didn't get the chance to do today was to take my walk at Puget Creek. So far there have been no signs of salmon in the creek, and unless they show up over the next few days while Natalie and I are off visiting her parents in Longview, then they will officially be late. I hope we do have some salmon return...it would make our work at the creek much more rewarding to see the salmon returning.
Tuesday, November 20, 2001
Now we are getting some more diverse birds at the feeder, including a host of pine siskins. Finches and siskins have battled all day with the pesky starlings and a couple of steller's jays, and at one point there were four eastern gray squirrels foraging for dropped birdseeds as well as feeding on the corn that we put out for them. I can't remember ever seeing more than two squirrels in our yard at one time in the past, so I would guess that the recent mild winters have been favorable for expanding the squirrel population in the neighborhood. The one argument against that though - I haven't seen many flat squirrels in the street yet this season. Either these guys have grown smarter or luck is with them...
Monday, November 19, 2001
Sure enough. In the first full day of our having bird food out in the side yard, we were swamped with birds. Unfortunately, as can be seen from the photo above, the bulk of the birds were starlings - the much maligned European stragglers that are not native to the U.S. but were introduced here on the East Coast and spread west at a rapid pace decades ago. We must have had dozens of starlings fighting over the food in our yard, and the neighbors' back yard was full of a couple hundred or more of the noisy birds.
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