Flying into Portland you can see there’s a lot of wild spaces in Oregon. Lots of forests, lots of habitats, and lots of microclimates. Once we were on the ground we hit the visitor center to learn a bit more about Oregon. The welcome center guide was a former Austinite who’d moved there and we had a nice long chat about various national parks, birding spots, and other things, and got info about Cannon Beach where we were heading after a night in Portland. We also got a recommendation for lunch, a Vietnamese place that was excellent.
Our first night there we walked the streets of Portland downtown near Broadway and Main. It wasn’t the most affordable city, but we enjoyed Portland a lot, even in November when it’s mostly gray. The Columbia river is a huge waterway with a number of shorebirds nearby, not far out of town there’s Sauvie Island which was a good spot to find sandhill cranes, and a bit further out in southern WA, there’s Ridgefield NWR – more on those later.
In Pioneer Square transit mall there’s a great breakfast food truck with a long line.
The next morning we drove out of Portland and onward to Cannon Beach, a very popular coastal town. We left with a loose schedule and a plan to stop and look around if we saw anything along the drive that seemed worth stopping for. We stopped at various spots along the way at scenic points, and wow is Oregon full of lovely scenic points and neat things:
There’s a stop right near Arcadia Beach that’s got a trail that follows a fairly strong stream/small river down to the ocean. Not a lot of wildlife, but just being among the ferns, mosses, and fungi was cool.
It was quiet when we checked into our room in Cannon Beach, Nov. is the off-season, but even with that there were still a fair number of people out at Haystack Rock and the beaches of Cannon Beach tended to have people walking them early, usually with loose dogs further driving away the wildlife, and the occasional eagle-chasing maniac.
Cannon Beach was still amazing. There were Roosevelt elk and white-tailed deer wandering around town, sometimes blocking traffic. The area is in the middle of a very wet conifer forest habitat hitting the Pacific, so it was full of life even in mid-November.
On our first morning, looking back from the patio we spotted a bald eagle nearby, we saw black oystercatchers wandering nearby, and saw tons of gulls, especially where Ecola creek fed into the Pacific.
I worked remote a bit at the start of Cannon Beach, we took walks on the beach after some meetings which was nice, and in our free time we took some time off to go see things.
We used Cannon Beach as a base and drove up and down the coast to visit different sites. While looking around we saw a Douglas’s squirrel, eastern bluebird, the shipwreck of the Peter Iredale, and spent a lot of time out in the cool wet forests full of moss, ferns, and fungi.
A new species of squirrel, and an eastern bluebird were both great finds. One bird I was hoping to spot up north was the golden-crowned kinglet. In Austin the ruby-crowned kinglet is a winter visitor. We found a few ruby-crowned kinglets.
Their cousin, the golden-crowned is much less common, but Oregon was a good place to find these, and happily we did at Fort Steven’s State Park!
The golden-crowned kinglet was very nice, and the coast overall was amazing to behold.
At the right time in the spring you can find Tufted puffins nesting on Haystack Rock, and apparently local birders bring out spotting scopes to let folks see them. No harlequin ducks or puffins when we were there, guess we’ll have to come back.
We spent most of our days there driving north or south to see the rest of the coast. We made it up to Fort Stevens State Park, where the shipwreck is off the coast and there’s very good birding, and drove south once very slowly seeing nearer things, and once going all the way down to Tillamook where we saw the cheese factories. In Garibaldi nearby there was great birding, we saw mergansers, buffleheads, surf scoters, and other weird ducks. The Oregon coast is full of scenic vistas.
Cannon Beach is a little touristy, a little pricey, and even in the off season it was much too crowded for my tastes, but it worked well as a base camp, and it really was a very cute town in a gorgeous setting. We found a place called Corbin’s in Cannon Beach that was a small family run restaurant that was something of a farm to table place, the fresh mushrooms and literally everything they made were extremely good, and we made reservations for the next night to come back once we found it.
We also went to Pig’N Pancake, all day breakfast menu – it’s paradise.
The Oregon coast’s beautiful old forests growing right to the edge of their rocky shore were truly wonderful to visit and explore. We drove back to Portland a little later than we’d first planned since it was hard to leave the coast.
The Nature Bloggist 