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Week Sixty-Seven, June 24-30, 2002

Sunday, June 30, 2002

Our second day of research around the Potholes area in Eastern Washington wrapped up today with a long drive home and back to the clouds and rain of Western Washington. We found some great places along the way throughout the day, though. We started investigating the Washington Department of Fisheries and Wildlife sites that are part of the Desert Wildlife Area along Frenchman Hill Road and Dodson Road. In all, there are five major pull-in sites along the roads that offer great looks at wetlands and marshes as well as some of the ponds that give the Potholes area its name.

It was along Dodson Road in one of the sites that I snapped the shot above of an Eastern Kingbird that was flycatching from a section of barbed wire sticking up alongside a canal. The wind was howling along at 20-30 miles an hour, much as it has been doing all weekend in this part of the Columbia Basin, when we investigated this area. And when we stopped at the Audubon Dodson Road Trail it was still blowing as we watched a hunting Northern Harrier being attacked by a Redwing Blackbird, and a few moments later a group of 26 White Pelicans silently flew overhead and to the west toward the Columbia River in the distance.

Another bird that we saw while walking the trails was a Great Egret. At first I didn't trust my eyes and figured it may be a single large White Pelican, but when I looked at it through my binoculars there was no doubt. It looked like a large Great Blue Heron, but pure white.

We saw a lot of Great Egret, along with Great Blue Heron and Black-crowned Night Heron at our next stop - the Potholes Wildlife Area. After driving past a family that was blasting at targets with rifles alongside the road, we first drove the gravel roads to a lookout over the northern edge of the Potholes Reservoir, where we looked down on Redhead, a Bullock's Oriole, and other birds foraging in the gusting winds. We also found and temporarily captured a Clouded Sulphur butterfly that was being battered to the ground, unable to fly because the wind was blowing too hard. Its wings were tattered from age and the battles with the wind.

We ran into a local bird watcher at this lookout and were told about the area we were about to drive down and check out next - a wildlife reserve area set aside because it is a major rookery for herons and Great Egret. When we arrived and walked out across the sagebrush dotted ground mixed with milkweed and grasses, we were both amazed at the raucous sounds from the squabbling herons and egret as they sat in their nests and flew from tree to tree. Back on the road, we drove to the far end of the wildlife area, stopping to see Clark's Grebe, a trio of Black Tern mixed in with Caspian and Forster's Tern, a Spotted Sandpiper, a trio of Black-necked Stilt, and a lone Greater Yellowlegs.

Our weekend long trip wrapped up with us driving back down Dodson Road and then turning west on Frenchman Hill Road to see what the habitat alongside the road there holds. There wasn't much notable, other than a Ferruginous Hawk we found flying over the orchards on the south side of the road.

Saturday, June 29, 2002

Medicare Beach, Potholes Reservoir, near Moses Lake:

Natalie and I scored a great free camping site tonight to wrap up a day of book research in Eastern Washington. Right now the sunset has turned the bottoms of the clouds to the northwest a hazy pink, while the sun sinks behind the Cascade Mountains whose shadows create fingers of dark to break up the bright pinks and oranges.

We covered 239 miles of varied parts of the state today after setting out from Tacoma later than planned this morning. Our first stop was to revisit Taneum Creek - an area I first investigated when adding a final chapter to Mountain Bike America: Washington. The area, shown in the photo looking upstream and up the canyon above, is as beautiful and varied as I remembered - full of song birds and enough butterflies that we had to remember to stay on task and get back to bird research. We drove up Taneum Creek Road about 10 miles, up the hillside past the trailhead where Jason and I started our mountain bike ride two years ago and high into the hills to stop and eat lunch. With habitat that varies from sage and grasslands below, talus slopes and rocky bluffs as the road climbs into the canyon, and then mixed forest as the road enters the Wenatchee National Forest, this will be a great site for a chapter in Birding Washington.

We spent more than three hours in Taneum Canyon, and so our next stop at the Quilomene Wildlife Area along the Old Vantage Highway was much speedier. We stayed in the gusty winds long enough to see a Sage Sparrow, a Sage Thrasher, and a lone Swainson's Hawk hunting over the sage brush. We made another stop at the Gingko Pretrified Forest a few miles down the hills toward the Columbia River, where I took the photo above that looks down the rest of the canyon to the river. After wandering the grounds here and seeing a Lark Sparrow and a Western Kingbird, among other birds in the small oasis of green around the ranger residence, we rejoined Interstate 90 and headed east, hoping to at least explore a bit along Dodson Road on our way to finding a camp site.

Our first attempt at a camp site at Potholes State Park failed. All the sites were full, even for tent camping, but the park attendant gave us a map to a free parking and camping area not far away at an undeveloped site called Medicare Beach. Once we found the beach we were excited to be here rather than in the developed park. The camp is little more than a few clearings in the sage brush alongside the Potholes Reservoir, with no established camp sites or amenities.

Our state needs more of these places, where anyone with a tent or even just a car can pull in and set up camp free of charge and just enjoy nature...

Tuesday, June 25, 2002

I found out something interesting about the boat cruise that Natalie and I will take to Protection Island from the Puget Sound Marine Science Center in Port Townsend. It turns out that the trip we are taking on July 7 is part of an ongoing nature study project called The Menzies Project, which is surveying the plants and wildlife in the area around Port Townsend. This should make the trip even more interesting!

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