I'll fly when I'm good and ready, thank you very much

Even at such a young age, this part of the owl is less huggable than the previous post. While driving the auto tour at Ridgefield this past May, I came across a few people who had stopped in the forest. Two great horned owls had just fledged, one had taken its first flight but this one wasn’t quite so eager to test its wings.

This is the first shot I took, unfortunately it was severely overexposed but while I took more pictures of the owl, it never again looked at me, apparently unimpressed by my beak and talons. One of the parents was keeping a close eye on its young charge, who was more in a mood to sleep than to learn to fly.

I didn’t see it take the leap that day but for the next month the two young owls could be seen from the road, although much farther into the forest, with one of the adults always close by.

Downy soft

My downy feathers are huggably soft,
My beak and talons are huggably not.

Who am I?

Yeeeooowww that's cold!

I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a series of pictures about the ones that got away — pictures were I almost got what I was looking for, but one or two things didn’t come together like I hoped.

I spent a lot of time watching this swallow and took some pictures as he sang. Tree swallows don’t usually open wide to sing but they do open wide to yawn. The swallow was several feet above me, so before taking a picture I waited until he angled his head down towards me to get a more pleasing profile. But when he yawned he threw his head back and I couldn’t get the angle I wanted.

The thing I do like about the picture is it reminds me of the expression on Sam’s face after we adopted him as a kitten and took him to the vet for an exam. An instrument was inserted in a place none of us wants instruments to be inserted and a look of great surprise shot across his face.

A male tree swallow peeks out of a tree cavity where it is building its nest

Tree swallows nest in seemingly every tree cavity during the spring at Ridgefield. I love when they poke their heads out of the holes and made an effort to photograph them this spring. For this accommodating swallow I photographed it from both the front and side. It was a cloudy day so I set the exposure to blow the background to white.

A tree swallow in need of a good preening

I had settled in to watch a nuthatch flying back and forth to his nest when I noticed this tree swallow and his mate in the tree not far from me. I shifted my gaze and my camera lens back and forth between the two sets of birds for some time. Since the swallows weren’t disturbed by my presence, I used the opportunity to try some close-up shots of the male.

The male looked a little disheveled with a feather out of place, understandable given the frenetic pace of the nesting season.

Has anybody seen the white-breasted nuthatch? It was right here, I swear!

Some birds go to great lengths to discourage predators from raiding their nests. This white-breasted nuthatch went the route of disguise, using a grub as a fake mustache.

Cleaning out the nursery

An oak gall provides a natural perch for a house wren as it carries debris out of its nest. While the wren’s little beak is fine for excavating debris, it’s not much use at excavating the cavity itself. Like many forest residents, this house wren used a pre-existing cavity drilled by woodpeckers. I took many pictures but most came out blurry thanks to the frenetic pace with which the little bird hurled the debris from its new home.

This great horned owl kept its fledglings on a short leash

This great horned owl kept a close eye on its recently fledged youngsters over the course of several weeks. The owls were usually in sight from the auto tour at Ridgefield and became the stars of the spring at the refuge. I saw them many times but usually not in great light, so it was nice to see them in the warm light near sunset. Unfortunately the gates of the refuge close fairly early so I had to leave the owls before I wanted and head towards the exit.

In muskrat society, it's rude to not eat with your hands.

Muskrats have brown fur like most of our aquatic rodents, but they aren’t solid brown. They have white patches near the tip of their nose and white bellies, and especially when their fur is wet you can see the white at the base of their brown fur.

The muskrats at Ridgefield tend to be pretty skittish so I was surprised when this one didn’t bolt as I came up on it as I walked the forested section of the auto tour in late spring. The chubby little thing didn’t let my presence dissuade it from feeding plants into its mouth, usually with both hands, and let me watch for as long as I wanted.

See, not every bird picture I take is a tight close-up

While photographing a bee swarm at Ridgefield, off in the distance there was a quick flash of red. When I looked up this male pileated woodpecker was hammering into the soft wood, allowing a few quick shots before flying off into the distance.

Pileateds are our largest woodpecker in the United States, unless of course the ivory-billed is only mostly extinct.

A house wren uses it beak to preen its tail feathers

It took me a while to warm up to the little brown birds in general and house wrens in particular. But this spring I had a few nice encounters with house wrens and now I’m hooked. This wren gave me a spectacular view of its long tail feathers when it flew onto a rotten tree branch to preen.

The blue bee eater

Scrub jays do not belong to the class of birds known as bee-eaters that specialize in eating bees, but nonetheless this one had a strong predilection for them. A colony of bees had taken up residence in a cavity of this tree, and the jay used a nearby rock as a launching off point to fly in to snare one of the bees before returning to the rock to eat it.

Not much later the colony split and sent a swarm off to establish a new colony, so now the jay can dine out when the mood strikes.

Bees! Bees! Bees!

I was taken with the dramatic black-and-yellow pattern of the bees hanging in formation, but even more so with the co-operation of the colony as bees constantly flew into and out of the living, wriggling mass. Even though they stepped all over one another, they all seemed to take it in stride and focused on their common goal.

I like the wrong-way driver in the lower left corner who is upside down as she finds her way into the swarm.

A bee swarm hangs together despite the heavy rain

After first finding the bee swarm one cool spring morning, I was both pleased and concerned to find them still there the next day on a warmer but wetter morning. Despite looking like a solid mass, the swarm was anchored by the bees on top to some mossy branches while the bees below were just hanging on to each other. The mass of bees must have gotten much heavier in the rain, but these stout workers up top held their ground. They also took the brunt of the rain, the bee in the upper left is covered with a drop of rain as large as her head.

I hope they survived the wet weather and were able to find a new colony before they starved to death. I wasn’t able to get back to the refuge until the next week and by then they would have long since either established a new colony or died off. I didn’t see any little bee carcasses on the ground, I took that as a hopeful sign.

My two days with the bees did highlight how I need to get a new tripod and ballhead better suited to the weight of the big lens, I was using it for these shots to keep as much distance between myself and the bees as I could — even in their quiet state I wasn’t taking chances — and even with a remote release vibration ruined many of the shots.

I also need a new raincoat, mine has been shedding its waterproof lining and doesn’t keep me so dry anymore. The camera and lens have some weather-sealing but I also draped them in a heavy old bath towel and stooped below it to take a picture like an old-time photographer.

A black-tailed doe in the rain

After posting that I finally had gotten a picture of a deer at Ridgefield that I liked, the very next morning I arrived early in a heavy rain and found a doe and buck just past the entrance gate and before getting onto the refuge proper. I parked my car in a little pullout, rolled down the window, and draped a towel over the door to protect the insides from the rain. I watched the two of them for quite some time, I had the refuge to myself as apparently others don’t like the rain as much as I do.

I got this close look at the damp doe as she grazed in a small meadow at the top of the refuge. There used to be a lot of other meadows in the area even just a couple of years ago but they’ve been plowed under as Ridgefield has exploded into a bedroom community for Portland and Vancouver.

One good man, many good workers

One of my favorite experiences at Ridgefield this spring was discovering a bee swarm early one morning near the parking lot at the observation blind. I had walked right by it at first, more cognizant of the existing bee colony in a tree cavity to the right, but discovered it on the way back to the car. I’m allergic to bees and generally keep my distance but the cool temperatures kept them pretty quiet.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a swarm, one of the nice things about wildlife photography is that it encourages me to learn more when I see something I don’t understand. A quick visit to the Wikipedia page on bee swarms revealed that the colony was reproducing by sending off a large group of workers to start a new colony, waiting patiently en masse while their best scouts agree upon a new location.

I initially thought the one large bee in the picture might be the queen, but further reading revealed this to be a drone, the male honey bee, and the rest the female workers. I also learned that males don’t sting so I guess I’m only allergic to lady bees.

I have other pictures of the swarm to come, this is the one I cropped to use as the current header.

A male black-headed grosbeak eats berries while laying over during the spring migration

In mid-May I had my first chance to photograph black-headed grosbeaks as they stopped at Ridgefield during migration. I got some nice pictures of females, it’s not typical I get good pictures of an animal on my first try so I was pretty pleased, although disappointed not to get the male in the group that stayed out of sight.

But the very next week, at the end of a 13-hour day at the refuge, this male popped into a bush I had been watching and gave me a couple of poses as it dined on the bush’s berries. I spent as much time at Ridgefield as I could as you never know how long an opportunity will last during migration. Particularly true this time, as I didn’t see a single grosbeak the very next day, nor the next week, and with the berries mostly gone I knew they weren’t likely coming back.

A male tree swallow brings a feather back to the nest

I spent many hours in May at Ridgefield watching tree swallows nesting in seemingly every available tree cavity. In the first few weeks, I tried in vain to get shots of them collecting dried grasses to line their nests. Never did get that shot but was even more pleased at the end of the month to catch this male coming back to the nest with a large feather (large to him at least) to provide a soft feather bed for his mate and the coming hatchlings.

An eastern cottontail keeps a close eye on me

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18

A while back my teleconverter started overexposing everything by a stop, so I had to remember to deliberately underexpose to prevent from blowing out the image, something I often forgot to do. Being a night owl, I was particularly pleased with myself when I arrived near sunrise at Ridgefield and, when photographing this cottontail beside the auto tour, actually remembered to dial in the underexposure.

A few moments later I got my comeuppance. As I watched a muskrat swimming with its child, I realized that while I had remembered to compensate for my faulty teleconverter, I wasn’t actually using the teleconverter, so all I ended up doing was needlessly underexposing my images.

On a later visit I realized the converter was flaring badly under strong backlighting and ruined some images. Strike two.

But the coup de grâce was yet to come. While hiking along the auto tour, I watched helplessly as the camera separated from the lens and fell six feet to the muddy ground. On closer inspection it was the converter that had separated from the lens but I didn’t think much of it, I assumed I had accidentally bumped the release latch.

But it happened again a few minutes later, this time the camera clanged off the hard-packed dirt road hard enough that the batteries went flying from the flash. I suspect the teleconverter worked itself free just with the jostling motion of hiking. While the camera appears to have survived both falls with no damage save some scratches, I knew it was time to replace my old friend.

This Tamron teleconverter and my Tamrac bag are my oldest pieces of photography gear, I bought them in the early days so they’re almost 15 years old and have literally been along for every hike I’ve gone on during that time. The bag wears the crown alone from now on.

So long, old friend, and thanks for the memories.

A black-tailed doe in the soft early light

May is a wonderful time to be at Ridgefield, but it can be frustrating too, as the gates don’t open until well after sunrise and close before sunset. On a sunny day, that means the best light of the day is gone before you can even get onto the refuge and find an interesting subject.

But on a cloudy day, which we’ve had a lot of lately, you can still get some beautiful soft light even an hour after sunrise, and useable light for much of the day. I came across this black-tailed doe early one morning as she dined on plants in the River S Unit. It’s not exactly rare to see deer at the refuge, but not all that common either, and this is the first time I’ve been happy with one I’ve photographed there.

Too bad she didn’t have any young fawns with her! Or maybe she did, I would have never seen them in the tall grass.