Towheeblog

Cranes. The family that dances together migrates together.
Again, click on any image to enlarge.

Below: cormorants loafing along Multnomah Channel, harrier soaring.

SOMETHING LITURGICAL COMES…
The kinglet is such a strong force, motion made visible. Through my mind as I watch or even try to track one with my lens runs an old churchy memory…”they kinglet come, they will be done, on earth…” The will of the kinglet is beyond our ken, our prediction, our control. Their sense of time and motion contrasts with our sluggish, nearly inert bodies. You will see in this sequence, about one-tenth of all images I got, why I shoot in bursts. In the last image, you see the thicket back to its quiet static self, the energy having flown.

In some images you can clearly see the Ruby-crown’s black wing bar. That is a crucial field mark for those of us who live here in country where we might encounter the otherwise similar Hutton’s Vireo. The vireo, of course, is less flighty and more circumspect in movement and behavior.
Below: a dark morph red-tail, then three shots of tiny fraction of huge Snow Goose flights that wavered across the sky as we gawked, my favorite Sauvie Island oak…then series at Wapato Pond yesterday with Tundra Swans and lots of dabblers, plus end image is of the same pond the day after Thanksgiving when it was largely a grassy bog:
At the pond we also saw a coyote in the tall grass. I thought he might be frogging. We heard chorus frogs on the island. Our only other wild mammals were tree squirrels.
I am leading three different birding trips at Malheur this year: May, June and September. They are sponsored by Malheur Field Station. Click here details, price includes all meas and accommodations.