Special sections
- Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge visit, March 2001

Rob's books

- Insiders' Guide to the Olympic Peninsula

Nature writing sites
- Nature Close to Home
- Creeping with Utah Nature Study Society
- The Nature Web
- Nature.net
- Nature writing references
- Nature writing

Environment news
- Tidepool

Resources
- eNature.com
- Olympic Park Institute
- North Cascades Institute
- Orion Society
- Open Spaces
- Second Nature
- The World as Home
- Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Rob's other Weblogs
- Mac Net Journal

Other stuff
- Rob's Resume
- Natalie's Resume
- Rob's Portal
- Picture Album

Old Blogger archives

Week Seventy, July 15-21, 2002

Sunday, July 21, 2002

Sometimes when we are doing this book research we run across a place that is special enough that we wonder if we should include it in our upcoming book. The end of a dirt road that offers the view of Mt. Adams reflecting in the waters of Trout Lake Marsh in the photo above is one of those areas. We ended our research on this hot day at Trout Lake Marsh, which I think we will indeed include in Birding Washington, but there was a lot more to our journey today than this one stop.

We set out this morning from the park near Goldendale and drove west on Highway 142 out of Goldendale. What a road. This route took us to a canyon where the now single-lane paved highway wound down into the folds of the hills, exposing the area's volcanic origins in flood basalts and other more recent eruptive rocks from nearby Mt. Adams and much older volcanoes of the past. When we reached the bottom of the canyon where a little creek serves as one of the headwaters of the Klickitat River. We watched a Downy Woodpecker, Wood Pewee, and other birds here as the water rushed down the canyon just a few feet away from where we parked alongside the road. We were trying to catch a view of the Acorn Woodpecker that can sometimes be found in the oak trees along the Klickitat River, but even though we drove the length of the river down to the Columbia River Gorge, we didn't see any of the woodpeckers. I did have us stop at one point along the river to check for Monarch butterflies in the milkweed along the banks of the river, but I saw no signs of the great gliding butterflies in this place. They are much more likely to be found further to the east, along the Snake River and the Columbia River near Richland.

After driving a little way west along the Columbia Gorge, we turned to the north in the town of Bingen for the drive up to the Conboy Lake National Wildlife Refuge and then over to find the Trout Lake Marsh area. Conboy Lake has to be one of the most misnamed wildlife areas in the system of national wildlife refuges. The are is criss-crossed by roads than wind through wetlands and marsh areas in the summer months that are actually wet enough to be mistaken for a lake in the fall and winter, when migrating waterfowl descend on the area on their route to destinations farther to the south.

We found our way to the main entrance to the refuge around 2 p.m., and after taking a break to view the grassy fields that make up the refuge in summer time, we drove the gravel road back out of the refuge to check a small trail system map we had seen on the drive in. What a great stop! Not only did I find three or four species of butterflies nectaring on pearly everlasting - including Common Wood Nymph, the Mariposa Copper in the photo above, a type of gray hairstreak that I have yet to identify, and a few fritillary butterflies that were too shy to let me get a photo - but while I took photos of the butterflies I could hear the haunting calls of Sandhill Cranes in the trees nearby, where they spend the summer as the only breeding colony of these cranes in Washington state.

After spending more time looking for the actual lake at Conboy Lake, we made the quick jaunt to the tiny town of Troutdale, which serves as the gateway to recreation and camping activities around Mt. Adams. It took no time at all to find the Trout Lake Marsh, just by looking at the DeLorme map and guessing where it must be, and we spent another hour or so eating and watching birds in this marsh that must be teaming with bird life in the mornings and evenings, not to mention in the migration season!

Our long trip came to an end with a drive up the Columbia River Gorge to Washougal and Vancouver, and then with a stop at Natalie's parents' place in Longview before we headed home, exhausted and in bad need of showers...

Saturday, July 20, 2002

It was hard to even get started on any bird research this morning. My heart just wasn't in it after a week in which we found out that Natalie's mother had suffered a stroke recently and the reality of this book research, the financial and time limitations, are forcing us to re-examine and ask for an extension for finishing the manuscript. But we set out anyway, planning to take Highway 410 around Mt. Rainier and over Cayuse and then Chinook Pass before heading to the Toppenish National Wildlife Refuge and to points eastward toward Walla Walla.

After getting off to a slow start, our first stop was along Hwy. 410 where I snapped the shot above of Mt. Rainier and the White River valley as it flows away from the volcano carrying a milky slurry of glacial silt that gives the river its name. We watched butterflies puddling along a small stream alongside the highway, and I snapped other photos of Boisduval's Blue butterflies, this time the highland variety, as they gathered salts from the soils along the stream bed. We heard a few birds here, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Farther up the road, we stopped first near Cayuse Pass and then again at the pull off for Tipsoo Lake, a place that we really need to visit again sometime, either this year or next. It looks like a good place for hiking, and even though there was still snow on the ground today, it could also be great for butterfly watching.

Since we were in the neighborhood, we made a three-hour detour to look for the Black-Backed Woodpecker that had been reported in the Nile Road area further down Highway 410 toward Naches, and in the end we did end up hearing the bird, but never seeing it.

We didn't arrive at the Toppenish National Wildlife Refuge until nearly 5:30 p.m., and in the smoky air and stagnant heat with temperatures in the 90s, we started the walk along a mowed path through the field near the refuge office. Little did we know we were walking into the home field for an infestation of ticks. The annoying bugs started clinging to my legs once we got a ways into the walk, and though I didn't immediately recognize them as ticks, I knew they were not good news as I would walk 10-15 feet and then have to reach down and whisk them off my bare legs. In between the tick problems, we watched a number of Mourning Dove in the thickets along the creek, and we also watched a Black-crowned Night Heron fly away from us and land in a tree about 100 yards away. This was a much better sighting than the Black-crowned Night Herons we watched earlier this month at the Potholes Wildlife Area.

Our real treat for the day took place when we reached the area around the refuge office. There, not more than 20 feet away, sat a pair of Great Horned Owls in a pine tree. We startled the owls, which appeared to be a female and her single young owl, further into the trees around the office, but we were able to watch the young owl for the duration of our visit. The adult owl moved to the outer edge of the trees around the refuge office, and while we were there we also found owl pellets under one of the trees near the refuge office.

The other interesting sight was two pair of California Quail with their young. The first were along the north side of the gravel road to the office and when we walked closer they started to run into the grass with about 10 small quail in close pursuit behind them. A bit closer to the parking lot on our way back to the car for some quality tick removal time we saw another pair of quail fly into a tree along the south side of the gravel road, and they had 10 or more young of their own, although these quail were older and flew off as we approached.

With the time approaching 7 p.m., we changed our travel plans and decided to head south over Satus Pass toward a campground near Goldendale, and when we arrived there an hour later they still had campsites. We found more ticks on us at the campsite, in our tent, and even overnight with a rude awakening at some ungodly hour when Natalie felt one of the bugs on her and then I felt one a bit later crawling on my neck. We are now officially not tick fans...

Wednesday, July 17, 2002

I stepped outside tonight to look at the sky and see if the Common Nighthawks that have been flying around Tacoma were overhead, and while I didn't see the nighthawks, I did snap a shot of the wispy clouds overhead. I love these summer clouds, wispy cirrus and the delicate moisture at the edges of larger clouds...

Copyright © 2002 White Rabbit Publishing.

All rights reserved.