Bower Slough – Page 2

Treed

While driving past Bower Slough I came upon a family of river otters that were fishing and preening and playing. After a while a family of raccoons came meandering down the shoreline but they bolted for the trees when the otters saw them. After the otters circled the trees for a while they moved on and eventually the raccoons descended back to the ground. This one initially got caught behind some wire mesh that had been put around the base of the tree to protect it from beavers, but it climbed back up past the mesh and hopped into an adjacent tree and then to the ground.

Wood Brothers

A pair of male wood ducks take a break on a fallen tree in Bower Slough.

Blue on Pink

For a month in early 2011, I often saw this adult great blue heron hunting for small fish in the same location at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. I looked for it every time I drove the auto tour, as the duckweed in the slough was turning red instead of green, providing a pink backdrop in the soft overcast light rather than the more common greens and browns and blues.

Thin Is In

A good Ridgefield car isn’t just quiet, it’s small. Thin in width and short in length. Height is a mixed bag, a low height is useful for shooting into the water, taller is better for seeing over grasses and shooting into trees. But narrow and short, yes yes yes, more please.

The auto tour at Ridgefield is a gravel road that starts off both wide and two-way but most of the loop is narrow and one-way. There are pull-outs strategically placed around the loop where you can pull over and sit to your heart’s content, and other places where the road is wide enough that if you pull over, other cars can still get by. But there are a few places I love to shoot that I can’t really stop without blocking the road, at least if I’m in our Subaru, but with a narrow car perhaps some traffic could get by.

One such place is the culvert where I photographed this great blue heron. I had seen it on previous weeks and looked for it every time I drove by and got some shots of it catching small fish, watching it with one eye my rear-view mirror with the other. On this oh-so-early morning it wasn’t at its usual fishing spot but was standing on a branch over the water, and better yet the duckweed had turned red and presented an unusual background. Fortunately there wasn’t any traffic at that early hour and while the heron never yawned like I hoped (apparently my yawns weren’t contagious), it did pose nicely and patiently against that wonderful color. Another car did eventually come and I had to drive off, but I had my pictures.

I never saw the heron there again.

Most cars have grown wider and longer since I last was in the market. But thankfully the sub-compacts are a hotly contested category these days, chock full of the little hatchbacks I love so much. And one of my favorites, goodness to me, is a Chevy. A Chevy! In the twenty-five years I’ve been driving I don’t think they’ve made one car that interested me.

And now they make not one but two!

The Volt is intriguing as, while not small, it is literally the quietest car I could drive to Ridgefield, at least the 2013 model coming out this fall, since I could drive the entire day on electric power, all without those infuriating artificial beeps and spaceship sounds the Toyota and Lexus hybrids make. I could drive nearly all of my work commute on electric power too, and since I despise noise I think I’d find the Volt a rather charming car.

Unfortunately it has very little ground clearance, which could be an issue for Ridgefield and certainly for Yellowstone and the Tetons. And it has no spare tire, so I’d be more hesitant to take it places with little-to-no cell coverage, which is all the places I go on my weeklong trips. And the layout of the car doesn’t work that well for us either, but even so if they had a version with more ground clearance and a proper spare, it would probably be my next car. And if it had all-wheel drive, oh oh oh! Oh oh oh! I’d better go and have a lie down.

The little Sonic shown below also has a low front air dam but I think it’s not quite as bad as the Volt. Not a hybrid so not especially quiet, but of all the sub-compacts, the turbo version is the closest car to my beloved 92 Civic Si. Not crazy amounts of power, but enough to be both fun and fuel efficient, and I’ve always preferred handling to horsepower in any case. It’s a bit pricey for a sub-compact and, the funny thing is, even though it was at the car show back in January, I wasn’t too taken with it then. The instrument cluster on the dashboard seems extremely gimmicky and I found it off-putting when I sat in it. And the car was too new for much to have been written about it.

The Honda Fit was the sub-compact that stole my heart at the show.

But what got my attention on later review were the Sonic’s stellar crash scores, especially the side-impact tests, even on the difficult federal tests. The more I read about it the more I was drawn in. Surprised too to learn that it’s made in Michigan, we lived there when I was a kid so I’m rather smitten with the American mitten. Eventually the Sonic shot up into my top tier, and depending on the hour and day, even sat at the top.

One nice thing on the Chevy website is that as you build out your virtual vehicle, they show you if there are any available on dealer lots in your area, and even show colors and installed options. One weekend the exact car I wanted was sitting on the nearby dealer’s lot. Fortunately for me I had been without a hot shower for a week thanks to a defunct water heater and I didn’t feel like going out. The Sonic was sold soon thereafter, so that temptation was gone.

I’m not ready to buy yet but I was still surprised by how strong the desire for a test drive was when I knew the exact car I wanted was at my fingertips. Tip of the hat to whoever hooked up Chevrolet’s website to their dealer network like that, a very nice touch.

You almost got me.

The Road to Madness

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 …

Ring in Red

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

Synchronized Preening

Early one morning on Mother’s Day, I stopped along the auto tour at Ridgefield to watch wood ducks in a quiet channel. A sudden dark form in the water caught my attention, I hoped for a beaver but knew it was more likely a nutria, the most commonly seen of the large rodents. Muskrat frequent the area as well but it was too large to be a muskrat.

My first impression from the size and shape of the head was that it probably was a beaver. There was little doubt left when its large, round form emerged onto the far bank, and no doubt remained when its broad flat tail finally came out of the water. I was feeling pretty blessed, watching the beaver preening, when a second dark shape swam onto the scene. To my delight, a smaller beaver climbed up onto the bank next to the large one and began grooming itself before finally snuggling up to the larger beaver.

Upon getting home, I learned that there is no difference in size between beaver sexes, but that the young often stay with the parents for the first couple of years, so this is most likely parent and child. I don’t know the sex of the older beaver, but given the day, I’d like to think they were mother and child.

From Water to Earth

This red-legged frog had been sitting in the duckweed before hopping up onto a small rock. I wanted to convey a sense of the frog emerging from one world to another, so I placed it at the bottom of the frame with the top third green water, the middle third transitioning from water to earth, the bottom third solid ground.

White Claws

This was the first time I had seen a muskrat out of the water, even from a distance I was startled to see how long and white its claws were. Taken in a quiet backwater channel on the Kiwa Trail at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

Shadow of a Hunter

A great blue heron perches on a downed tree as its shadow is cast over the green water. Even though it was actively scanning and listening for movement in the water below, its perch seemed too high to have a chance at capturing any frogs or fish, so it may have been in reconnaissance mode. It eventually started hunting closer to the water.