Few Clouds, Abundant Birds

Kinda dull cloudwise, but the birds are fantastic at Nisqually NWR right now.

      I spent this glorious May morning at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. With the help of dozens of fellow birders (ace to amateur), several mega-spotting scopes, various field guides, and lots of pointing, I caught sight and sound of all sorts of birds I never would have seen or been able to identify on my own. 

   For example: one guide pointed into the sky behind us and told us to "put your bins on the moon." We focussed our binoculars on the waning gibbous moon, still high in the sky, and saw several dark  twinkling shapes flying past the pale, white face of the  moon. Vaux's swifts. Stunning. Fleeting. Unphotographable. 

  As it turns out, none of the birds I saw over the next few hours were interested in having their picture taken. Most birds were too fast (Vaux's swift), too twitchy (rufous hummingbird, yellow warblers), too distant (juvenile bald eagle, green winged teal, cinnamon teal, cliff swallows, pie-billed grebe), or too camouflaged (Rail, lesser yellow legs, greater yellow legs), too fascinating to watch (tree swallows) or just plain invisible (sora). Only a camera with a lens the size of a cannon was a match for some of these species. 

   So I focused on the greening landscape and the bounty of bright wings and songs and marveled at the unremarkable looking birds I was told were en route to the Arctic tundra....from South America.  

   No one noticed or even mentioned the Canada Geese-the very conspicuous, very common year-round residents at the refuge. They are really too large and too abundant to be "special" or worth going out of your way to photograph as they sit (pose?) at the edge of the refuge walking trails. The Canada Geese know they don't rate.  At least one goose did today, the one looking wistfully out toward all the birders with their attention and binoculars focused elsewhere.   

What do I have to do to get noticed around here?

Click here

for more information on Nisqually NWR.

Click here

 for information on The Black Hills Audubon Society, which conducts weekly bird walks at the refuge.

Preparing for Flight

   Twenty four hours before traveling, I am not packed, not ready, and not at home when it's time to check in for my flight online. Why? Because I am at Nisqually National Wildlife refuge with a friend. She has offered to take me to the willow thicket to see the Swainson's thrushes. I have been hearing them sing their heart-piercing song for weeks but have yet to see one of these cryptic birds.

    Monday morning at the refuge is apparently the time when a volunteer walks the boardwalk trails with a leaf blower. As you might imagine, this makes hearing the thrushes difficult. So, we bide our time near at the edge of the thicket where, two weeks prior, my friend spotted a rufous hummingbird at its nest. Hummingbird nests are tiny and well camouflaged and are nearly impossible to find unless you can track an adult to the branch where it has built one.

    While we try to relocate the nest (this takes a while), I catch sight of some medium-sized, freckle-breasted brown birds flying into the elderberry bushes. Swainson's thrushes--hark!--two of them. I am thrilled. "Don't they have the most beautiful innocent-looking eyes you've ever seen?" my friend asks.

   We watch the thrushes for a while, and, once the leaf-blower ceases, we hear their calls all around us. I am happy. I am ready to go home and pack. We have given up on the hummingbird nest, but see the adult bird fly to a branch. This changes everything.

    My friend sets up her spotting scope and we spend the next hour ignoring the thrushes and watching two baby hummingbirds in an impossibly small nest. The nest is made of lichen and is wrapped in spider webs; this durable, flexible material allows the nest to expand as the chicks grow (they start out as eggs the size of a small grape). At first, we see only the dark backs of the birds and the needle-like beak extending over the nest cup. But we are patient and are rewarded. The chicks pop there heads up, stand up, and practice flapping their wings. Their wings flutter so rapidly that they disappear in a blur of diaphanous gray. They are ready to fledge. They turn around in their nest, and settle themselves in. Through the spotting scope, I watched a baby hummingbird blink. I watched it go from alert to drowsy, its eyes opening and closing slower and slower until it slept. I watched the feathers on its back rise and fall with its breath.

   I am sorry I do not have photographs of this. Nor do I have photographs of the joyous moments that followed. Insert your imagination here.

   A group of school children and their teachers are heading toward us. They are on a field trip to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge. Because my sprite-like friend is as generous as a person can be without completely disappearing, she lowers her scope so that these children can look through it to see the hummingbirds. Lowering the scope, however, means the side rails of the boardwalk block the view of the nest. There is only one option. I get down on bended (two syllables) knee.

   One after the next, the very serious children--I am guessing five or six years old--step up onto my thigh to get eye level with the eye piece. I hold their hands to help them balance.

   From my vantage point, below them, I see something more fantastic than a blinking baby hummingbird. I am looking up at their faces. I am watching as they lean in toward the eye piece. I am watching their long eyelashes nearly touching the lens. I watch smiles break across their chins and mouths and cheeks. They see the nest. I see smiling mouth after smiling mouth of missing baby teeth, half-grown adult teeth, a few gold-filled cavities, gummy smiles, big smiles. These children are beaming.

   One after the next, the smiling children pull away from the spotting scope as soon as they spot the birds. They do not linger to watch the hummingbirds, they do not hog the scope. They want to let us know that they have seen what we have seen.   

    An hour or more later, after three groups of young students on field trips have seen the hummingbirds, we know it is time to move on. 

   I have been thinking about those hummingbirds and those smiles ever since. I have been thinking about what to make of this experience, what larger point to draw, what life lesson I can share, what epiphany will come if I push it in that direction. But this is not something I am going to muck up with metaphors. That hour--so pure and powerful--seems to resist amplification or expansion. There is no room for anything else. Except my restraint.

Warm Sun, Icy Skies, Bittern

Cirrus duplicatus over Enumclaw, Washington

  Our recent and most-welcome warm weather in Western Washington this week has brought warm temperatures (50s F) and cloudy skies to the region. Cloudy?! locals might gasp. Yes, cloudy, the Accidental Naturalist insists. I'm on a mission to restore the good name of "cloudy" and divorce it from its knee-jerk association with low, gray, rain-making clouds. This weekend was cloudy. Just look.
   Saturday, my husband and I drove toward Enumclaw for a snow-free, low-elevation hike along the White River. With the dog. Who needed a leg-stretch. Who got us out on a rails-to-trails path outside the town of Buckley. Where we watched the skies get crazy with cirrus clouds that first caught my husband's eye because they looked "square."
   Nature isn't too fond of square shapes, especially in the cloud department, but these clouds had some edges and corners (at least from our perspective):

"Square" clouds indicate cirrus at more than one altitude with winds blowing the filaments in different directions.

  Once we started looking up at these clouds, we couldn't stop looking. Then the breeze kicked up. We walked a bit further, looking east, west, north, and south toward Mt. Rainier. We couldn't figure out what the skies were telling us. So I told my husband I thought the sky was "thickening" a bit and it would likely rain in 24 hours. Maybe 36. This was a mistake. I figured I had a 70-30 chance of being right. It was, after all, February in the Pacific Northwest. Often, cirrus clouds to portend rain. But only if they show a marked progression of lowering (to cirrostratus, altostratus, nimbostratus...rain). These cirrus dominated the sky.

I'm not sure what's going on here with this leaping cirrus cloud.

Here we have cirrus fibratus (I'm 86% sure) and what appears to be a salmonid migration of small altocumulus lenticularis.

  I have about fifty photographs of the skies on Saturday. I will spare you only so I have your attention for what happened on Sunday--another cloudy day in South Puget Sound. Look!

Clouds at sunset at Nisqually NWR. During the Super Bowl.  It is challenging to tell cirrocumulus from altocumulus--I haven't acquired the skill yet to judge the size of the cloudlets or height of the clouds. I'm working on it.

Heading west on the I-5 toward the Black Hills, the clouds produced a feature that looked like whale's baleen.  I believe these are trailing ice-crystals called virga.

  At this point, you might be wondering why I seem to know so little about the clouds I saw this weekend. The problem is that despite my studying, constant use of cloud guides, sky guides, weather blogs, and National Weather Service data, it's difficult to match the clouds I'm seeing at any one moment to the data available. And no matter how many photographs I scrutinize, the clouds in the pictures (the supposed "type specimen") never quite match the pictures I've taken. Unlike the American Bittern.

An American Bittern, one of four seen hunting during the Super Bowl at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

  Under those gorgeous sunset skies at Nisqually on Sunday, my husband and I were able to identify the secretive and camouflaged marsh bird--the American Bittern. This relative of the herons was hunting in the reeds and grass along one of the inner boardwalks. It looked just like its photograph in the Audubon field guide. We walked a bit further. And we saw four more bitterns. They looked and acted like the field guides said they would. It was so simple. And so satisfying.

Birds? What Birds?

Wednesday morning birders at Nisqually NWR.

     The first hour of my Wednesday morning did not go well. I slept through the alarm, had to cancel my first appointment, was already running late for my second, and forgot a third. But nothing was going to keep me from joining the birders at Nisqually. So what if it's 27 degrees Farenheit?
   Every Wednesday morning at 8, a genial band of birders gathers at the refuge Visitors' Center for a three-hour birding walk with Phil Kelley or another Nisqually NWR volunteer. Usually there are several refuge volunteers in the group all with spotting scopes, field guides, and much knowledge to share with beginner as well as experienced birders. The weekly walk is organized through the Black Hills Audubon Society; there is no fee for the walk, just the $3 refuge entrance fee. Tip: spend your first $3 of the day at Nisqually instead of Starbucks.

Pintails, snow goose, mallards, shovelers, mergansers, buffleheads, Canada geese, and goldeneyes are commonly seen in the refuge ponds.  Luckily, they did not distract me from the cirrus sky above.

   Until this month, I have been going to Nisqually to walk, usually very fast, out to the end of the new boardwalk and back. Nisqually was exercise with a great view, maybe some bald eagles, a harrier, or other large bird I could see without binoculars. Now I go to walk very slowly and just to the start of the boardwalk looking at birds. I cannot call what I am doing "birding." I am looking at clouds while birding. I am chatting while birding. I am not pulling out my field guide or making a list. I am hearing the names of the birds and watching them fly and perch and hunt. Being in their company is marvelous. As is being in the company of a group of people who seem to want nothing more than to make sure everyone sees what they do--and delights in it.
   There is a generosity of spirit that infuses this group and that seems to build during the walk. The volunteers and birders set up their Swarvoski spotting scopes and newcomers are invited to take a look. Birds are identified, genders noted or guessed at, behaviors marveled over, plumage admired. Everyone will see something common such as a bald eagle (usually several) and everyone will see something unusual or something few have seen before. This morning, in addition to many eagles, we saw one cryptically colored American Bittern crouched down in the grass, it's feathers fluffed against the cold. We watched a red-tailed hawk perched in a small tree warming itself in the sun--its wings spread like a cormorant, its tail fanned out so that we could see individual feathers. Common or rare, it was all stunning. And unphotographable with my l'il camera that is better suited to big skies.

Here are the cirrocumulus clouds. There is a bald eagle in the top of that Douglas-fir.

Altocumulus lenticularis forming above the pond where waterfowl dabbled.

This January sky holds so much more than I will ever know.

   To find out for yourself what's in the sky and waters of Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge (8 miles from Olympia) follow this link: Black Hills Audubon. Or better yet, cancel all your Wednesday appointments and go the refuge at 8.