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Week Forty-six, January 28-February 3, 2002

Sunday, February 3, 2002

After all of our driving around Western Washington yesterday, today I stayed home while Natalie ventured to the Tacoma Art Museum. I was held here by work - I had to busy myself with all of the SuperBowl hoopla throughout and before the game, working for Lycos. And between the work and waking with a headache, I didn't even get outside much today.

Today's photo was actually taken during yesterday's book research - a closeup of a pussy willow budding out along the entrance to the Sandpiper Trail at the Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge. Natalie really wanted a shot of this, and she gathered sprigs from the ground around the plant, which had been pruned recently to maintain a view of the mudflats at Bowerman Basin.

Saturday, February 2, 2002

Bring on the 10-month birding adventure, otherwise known as the research and writing of another book. Birding Washington won't be available in bookstores until 2003, but over the next nine months as Natalie and I work to complete the project by the Halloween deadline. And as a step toward that far-off deadline, we visited four birdwatching sites that will be included in the book. 261 miles of driving, a couple of miles or more of walking and a dinner at an Irish pub in the town of Ocean Shores...what a Saturday.

We still haven't tallied up the total number of bird species we saw today, but we had a nice view of a bald eagle, a pileated woodpecker and a group of tundra swans on a popular birding loop called the Brady Loop near Aberdeen, then we walked the Sandpiper Trail at the Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge on Bowerman Basin along the north shore of Grays Harbor. As we walked the trail under darkening skies, we watched and took photos of winter wrens and also had a close encounter with a marsh hawk, now known officially by another name, a Northwen Harrier. I still like the name marsh hawk more.

The other two sites were in Ocean Shores - places that we visited in October of last year with our intermediate birdwatching class from the Tahoma Audubon Society. It took a while for us to locate a small local birding spot called Bill's Spit, and once we were there the tide was high enough that the spit was mostly under water. And it was growing too dark to want to venture to Damon Point - the gem of a wildlife preserve that serves as home and stopover for many shorebird species. With daylight running out, we opted to stop by the north jetty at the mouth of Grays Harbor, and there we were rewarded with the view of the western sandpipers shown in the photo above.

This is just the first stop on our birding journey. Stay tuned for more. We are going to include around 115 birding sites in our book, so each weekend will be filled with research!

Friday, February 1, 2002

Another busy day kept me indoors and away from photo opportunities. I spent time today working more on the growing outline for Birding Washington, slightly reorganizing the order where the sites will fall in the final version of our book and also checking the maps to determine where we should go for our birding research tomorrow.

The schedule is set: Tomorrow we will visit the Grays Harbor area and the four sites we will feature at the north end of the harbor. I look forward to seeing the hawks, waterfowl and shorebirds tomorrow!

Thursday, January 31, 2002

I swear that the red-tailed hawk that hangs out along Highway 16 is toying with me. I saw him this afternoon for the first time in a couple of weeks, and I got out of the pickup and snapped a couple of photos, but neither was close enough to get a good look. In the shot above, I just snapped the photo as he launched himself off the top of a light pole and flew east to land on the power line that crosses over the highway. And there he sat, well out of reach of my camera, sitting dead center over the top of the highway. I wonder how many people passing in their cars below even noticed his presence?

Back home and right before nightfall I wandered out on the front porch and saw a bird sitting at the top of a tree 20 yards away. It didn't look like a flicker or a pigeon, so I decided to head back into the house for the binoculars. No sooner had I opened the door then he flew, and from his flight it appeared to be a sharp-shinned hawk. He must has been scoping out our bird feeders for a small bird for dinner...

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

Nothing remains of the snow that fell last night or earlier this week, and now with the rain falling and breeze blowing, we are back into the normal late winter weather. It was dark and dreary enough out today that I didn't get out to take a photo...

Tuesday, January 29, 2002

Snow fell again today, making this one of the longest cold and snowy periods we have had here in Tacoma in the last three or four years. But it doesn't look like the snow will last long. Tonight, even as the snow is falling hard, temperatures hover around freezing and it just feels like the change over to more common rainy and windy weather is happening. I spent the evening watching the snow fall now and then, between times of reading and relaxing. There is just something soothing about watching the snow fall, and tonight I watch because this could very well be the last snow of the winter.

To get my photo for this afternoon, I wandered out in the yard and snapped the hopeful sprouts of crocus bulbs as they ready themselves for spring. From the looks of these shoots, we are just a couple of weeks from seeing the first flowers of spring!

Monday, January 28, 2002

Bits of snow remain around North Tacoma today, and the temperatures remain low enough for more snow to fall, but the clouds overhead are not laden with moisture. It looks like we are in for a typical Western Washington snow period - one where the snow fades from memory slowly, with overnight bouts of ice to remind us that it is winter.

I drove Natalie to work this morning in the tideflats, and on the way home I stopped along the Ruston Way waterfront to snap a photo of the snow-capped Olympic Mountains and the smaller mountains in the foreground as seen from the Old Town area. It was cold as I watched gulls soaring overhead and Barrow's Goldeneyes paddling away from the shore where I stood.

Tonight I finished reading a birding book that Natalie gave me for Christmas. The book, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds: Notes from a Northwest Year, is written by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, a Seattle-area resident who used to be the education program director for the Seattle Audubon Society. It is a great book in the way that it looks at the natural history and observations of a number of very common birds - starlings, cormorants and crows, to name a few - and all of these observations are written in an approachable manner that seasoned birders could understand and appreciate just as well as those whose main encounters with birds are at their bird feeders or in the back yard. It's a good read, and a good start to my year-long dive into deeper birding knowledge.

Copyright © 2002 White Rabbit Publishing.

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