Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
One of my favorite rites of spring when we lived in the Northwest was listening to the savannah sparrows sing in the meadows. I met this one on an Easter morning 12 years ago, I had to wait a while to get the picture as it spent most of its time facing the other direction, singing to the other sparrows.
A female northern flicker searches for breakfast in a meadow on a rainy winter morning at Ridgefield in 2012. Given its widespread distribution across my country I wrongly assumed this would be the flicker I’d see most often in Arizona, but so far I’ve only seen the gilded flicker. To be fair I’ve only hiked in the desert, perhaps we’ll be reunited when I visit the forests. The two flickers are quite similar both in appearance and call, so in a way it feels like we were never separated.
A juvenile red-tailed hawk sits in a meadow in heavy fog at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Washington. The telephoto lens is exaggerating the whiteout effect as it is picking up all the fog between my car and the distant hawk but it illustrates the point: for an animal that might normally hunt by soaring high above the meadow and looking for voles below, a thick fog changes the dynamic between predator and prey.
The fog didn’t have such an impact on an American bittern stalking the shoreline that winter morning as it looked and listened for small creatures both on the land and in the water. Sometimes it hunted by slowly walking up and down the shoreline, sometimes by standing still, but in either case the thick fog would not obscure the prey such a short distance away.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I came across this crane in Yellowstone National Park in 2004. I was only aware of two species of crane in my country, the sandhill crane and the whooping crane. It looked like a sandhill apart from the brown coloring on its body, so I wondered if it might be a juvenile. Later research showed this to be a subspecies of sandhill, the lesser sandhill crane.
We’re moving to Arizona soon (we’re in Arizona at the moment, we found a house yesterday we’d like to rent), so I’m going to have a lot to learn as I explore my desert home. No matter how long I live here I’ll still come across identification puzzles, I still do even after being in Oregon for 21 years, a combination of my lack of skills and nature not always being so easily pinned down.
A bear searches for food. A rain falls in fall. A meadow before the mountain.
A coyote runs past in a frosty meadow, obscured in heavy fog, with a cackling goose in its mouth.
The water levels at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge are managed to mimic the seasonal flooding from the Columbia River in the days before the dams. But this flooded field comes courtesy of an unusually wet winter, even for the Pacific Northwest. The fawn is a Columbian whitetail, born to one of the does that was transplanted in the third wave of relocations.
When I visited Ridgefield a week ago I decided to only shoot with the new Sony camera and the adapter that lets me attach my Canon telephotos. I was expecting to have to rely on manual focus but the autofocus did work sometimes, although not consistently enough for this to be a combination I’ll use often for photos. For these shots I used manual focus, although I was still learning how to do it. I’d normally like a little more depth of field in a shot like this, especially to keep more of the pouring rain in focus, but by shooting wide open I was able to take more of an abstract and turn the grass that surrounded the hunting heron into a sea of green.
With the heron standing tall, you get more of a sense of the large meadow it was hunting in. I had no idea herons hunted in meadows until I moved to the Northwest, but all the voles that live here are well aware.
I didn’t have time to take any 4K videos of this heron, it struck into the ground and walked off when it came up empty, but I did take a few videos of some animals sitting in the pouring rain, including a bald eagle, a white-tailed deer, and some snipe. I’ve never edited video but I’ll see if I can learn enough to put a few clips up in the next month or so.
📷: Sony A6500 | Canon 500mm | Canon 1.4X
🗓️: March 26, 2017
An elk cow seems to be enjoying her grass dinner in the appropriately-named Elk Meadow in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park.
A moose cow walks with her calf (almost completely obscured by the tall grass in front of her) near the road from Mammoth to Tower in Yellowstone National Park. I am not a morning person (to put it mildly) so getting up early for photography is always a struggle. This visit to Yellowstone was in 2004 and I was still learning how productive those early hours can be. I finally decided to get up early to beat the crowds on the last day of the trip and was rewarded with close views of not just this moose and her calf but also a black bear and her two cubs, an elk cow and her calf, and bison as well.
Boolie 