In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Both of our cars are getting up there in years, and while they have low miles for their age, I’ve started thinking about what we should do when it comes time to replace them. I haven’t paid attention to the car scene in well over a decade, so my wife and I went to the Portland Auto Show a while back to get acclimated to the current state of the automobile. I had done a little research beforehand and so much since that sometimes I feel like I both know a lot more and a lot less than when I started.

The problem is that the car I want doesn’t exist. If you could take Toyota’s hybrid system and merge it with the new Subaru Impreza, you’d have my ideal car. I’d have a nice quiet car for Ridgefield to minimize the disturbance to my favorite subjects like this lovely great blue heron. Plus good gas mileage for commuting to work, with enough power for the ascent up the Sunset Highway, and Subaru’s lovely all-wheel drive system for when the weather turns wet or white. Not to mention the safety improvements compared to our current lineup.

Alas Subaru is keeping mum on any plans for hybrids so my dream car remains a dream. Not that we’ll do anything in the short term since no car made a clear claim to the crown, but at least I have an idea of what we might do if we had to replace one of the cars in a hurry.

The Impreza in hatchback form is still the frontrunner to replace my Civic, and perhaps even the Outback, but a handful of other contenders caught my eye at the show. Will this Impreza one day grace our driveway? Or will it be the …

Just a simple portrait of an extraordinarily common bird. We have a small flock of Canada geese that winters at work, with a few cackling geese sometimes present too, but since they make a mess of the sidewalks I think I’m the only one that is happy to see them. To me they are also a reminder that beauty lies not too far outside my cubicle walls.

This picture was taken not at work but at, well, you can probably guess.

I’ve seen bitterns catch a wide variety of animals, but even so I was caught by surprise when this one struck into the grass and emerged with a large earthworm. I knew some songbirds like robins ate worms but bitterns join egrets and kestrels as birds I was surprised to see hunting the wiggly worm.

A male ring-necked duck swims through duckweed in Bower Slough.

In this dark and dying day
I know he sits and watches.

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening.
Circe’s warning to Odysseus in Homer’s The Odyssey

I visit Ridgefield alone, intentionally alone, and have no men to lash me to the steering wheel that I might safely pass my Sirens, the bitterns that lurk at the edges of the marsh. Thus am I always compelled to stop, for seconds, minutes, even hours. A day may yet come when I have watched them enough, photographed them enough, that I can pass them by, but for now I am powerless to resist my Siren’s call.

I don’t get to see blue-winged teal very often so it was both a privilege and a joy to watch a mated pair this spring at Ridgefield. What a magnificent creature!

One of the distinguishing marks of killdeer compared to our other plovers is their distinctive double breastband. Except when they are babies, that is, as when they first hatch they have but a single band. At such a young age their stubby little wings only hint at the majesty of flight that is to come.

It rained, then poured. The king and I, we waited.

This American wigeon drake shows off his dabbling technique, tipping forward with his head underwater, eating plant life from the floor of the lake, while kicking with his webbed feet to hold his position.

Double-crested cormorants aren’t exactly rare at Ridgefield but they aren’t exactly common either. What is rare is to get such a nice close view, this one had just surfaced from fishing the waters of Bower Slough. The eyes of the cormorant are one of my favorites in all the bird kingdom.

I came across this marsh wren building its nest on a rainy spring day at Ridgefield. Before trying for pictures I watched it for a while to pick up its patterns and noticed it frequented two locations the most, the reeds above its nest where it would perch to sing, and some nearby cattails where it gathered nesting materials. I have a number of singing wren pictures so I opted for the cattails, and while I did get some nice pictures of it collecting fluff for its nest, I was surprised to find that one of my favorite pictures from the series was this picture of the wren doing absolutely nothing.

The wren frenetically flew between the cattails and its nest, sang to establish its territory, and hid from predators and others like the aggressive red-winged blackbird that periodically swooped down and landed at the nest. So I suppose I just like that, at least in the picture, the wet little brown bird can pause and rest in perpetuity.

A white-breasted nuthatch fledgling opens its mouth wide as its parent arrives with freshly caught insects. White-breasted nuthatches are cavity nesters, the adult below is sticking its head out of the nest as it prepares to fly off in search of more food for its hungry offspring. Adult nuthatches eat insects as well as seeds and nuts, but during the time I watched them the adults were only bringing insects to their brood.

As a child I was terrified not of Yuri Andropov but Leonid Brezhnev — not his politics but his eyebrows. When this agitated ruddy duck furrowed his head feathers into giant eyebrows I couldn’t help but think of the former Soviet leader. It was breeding season (for the duck, not the Soviets) and the male was annoyed by another in the area (his tail is also raised in defiance).

I’m not a biologist, but if you’re a Townsend’s vole and find yourself in this situation, you’re not having a good day.

A tree swallow in the late spring takes a brief break from hunting for insects on the wing over the waters of Long Lake.

When I think of birds eating insects, the insects I envision are those that annoy or destroy, but when I saw this nuthatch with a ladybug in its beak I was reminded that some species eat a wide variety of insects, be they “good” or be they “bad”.

I thought the picture of the close-up of a bittern’s face would be my favorite bittern picture of the year, but a month and a half later I got my current favorite, this view of the varied patterns and colors of a bittern’s plumage. This is an evolution of an idea that I first got photographing the colors and textures and patterns of the Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone, then evolved through trees in the Olympic rain forests and later the redwoods, then in birds in the great blue heron, turkey, and finally, finally the bittern.

I’ve been hoping for a picture like this for a long time. I had to crop heavily and don’t have quite as much depth of field as I’d like given the need for the fastest shutter speed in the low light to minimize motion blur from the moving bittern. Even with a big telephoto lens, and even with all that cropping, I had to be really close to get a picture like this. If you look into the bittern’s eye you can see a reflection of my favorite camera mount — our Subaru Outback.

By late spring Long Lake fills with frenetic blackbirds, yellow-headed and red-winged alike, the adults hunting insects to feed to their fledglings, the fledglings begging for more! more! more! with mouths wide open. There are plenty of insects in the shallows of the lake with which the parents can stuff their bills and soon enough the fledglings are filling out. They can look rather plump with their feathers fluffed out for warmth, but even so these fledglings clearly had parents who were on top of keeping those gaping maws stuffed with beaks full of bugs.