Our time in Cannon Beach was good, the coast there is gorgeous in the Fall. The weather was cool, there was some rain, but we were prepared for this, and it was still nice to be out in since it was dropping into the high 40s low 50s on the colder eves while we were there. Right when we left it got colder.
Our hotel was fine, the main goal there was mostly to avoid contact with people and this was easy. We spotted a western scrub-jay outside the hotel and got a phone photo right away that was good enough for an id. But the hotel had bathrooms with motion sensing lights that turned on automatically when we got up to take care of business early in the morning.
We found a great food truck complex that we went to most nights, we love our local food trucks, and there are a lot of food truck places in Portland that have nice seating and things.
On one of our evenings we went out to Powell’s and picked up a field guide to fungi since we were both learning more about mushrooms, and picked up Logicomix, a graphic novel that’s a bio of Bertrand Russell I finished on the flight home. It touches on Gödel, Turing, Cantor, and goes into more of Bertie’s life and career which I found very interesting.
The Columbia is a huge river that runs through Portland. Just to the south is an island, Sauvie Island, just south of Portland that we first headed out to. Our target bird was the sandhill cranes wintering there.
Sauvie Island is a fairly large island. We drove around it along the main road the followed the shore, and it’s generally really lovely. It’s got a lot of farms, they were growing tons of pumpkins while we were there. There are various wetlands dotting the island that fill with vast numbers of Canada geese.
The skies are regularly full of giant streaming flocks of geese. Their populations are doing quite well and the rich and wet marshy habitats on this island are perfect for them. They’re also great crane habitat.
We stopped early on to look around at one path and managed to accidentally flush a barn owl which flew right past us – super cool!
We kept an eye out for Sandhills but didn’t spot any for a while, though we saw a lot of raptors, shore birds, and lots of sparrow species, but mostly golden-crowned sparrows. Light was not ideal for photography for most of the morning, but the clouds lightened up over time and we got plenty of pics good enough to identify the local birds.
We used eBird and iNaturalist to look up hotspots and places with observations of sandhill cranes, and found a spot called Raccoon Point which was a great overlook where we spotted sandhill cranes, tundra swans, a bald eagle, and other things.
A number of local birders knew the spot, chatting with them we discussed other spots to visit. Virtually all recommended Ridgefield, so we put that on the top of our list.
The next day we headed out to Ridgefield NWR in south Washington. Ridgefield is a wildlife refuge, not a park. Wildlife refuges are effectively land set aside to protect duck, deer, and other wildlife populations for hunters, but they’re still generally good for birding. There was duck hunting going on in some areas, we could hear the noise, that part’s not my favorite, but even with that, this place was great for lazy birding.
One of the problems with birding in many areas of the US is that many outdoor areas draw a lot of people, and each big lumbering ape wandering around out there is seen (rightly) as a threat by most local birds. If any person brings a dog off leash then that’s an even worse threat, and most birds will leave.
At Ridgefield you drive in a very large loop using your car as a blind. Birds and wildlife are far more threatened by a loose person or a loose dog than they are by any car or truck. As a result there are a lot of birds in ponds and marshy areas hanging out near the driving path that would be long gone if anyone exited their car. Happily, exiting cars is forbidden. There were a number of cars like our making a very slow loop with a bit telephoto lens leaning out of the driver side window and binoculars peeking out of the passenger side.
There’s one very nice small footpath where we spotted the brown creeper and the downy woodpecker above, and also spotted a red-headed sapsucker, song sparrow, hummingbirds, red-winged blackbirds, etc. Also at the bathroom here we found this:
Along the drive there were really nice views of tundra swans, buffleheads, sandhill cranes, deer, elk, rabbits, and many species of duck.
We looped it twice and Ridgefield slightly late to go back to Portland, pack, and stage next to PDX to fly back to Austin.
After that trip, the company I was working for was acquired and I became very busy. The next trip we took was to Corpus Christi for the Birdiest Festival in America late Apr. 2022, which we’ve got a post about in the queue.
The Nature Bloggist 