Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
I spent the morning sitting still at the edge of Long Lake and was rewarded when a small group of hooded mergansers swam in close to feed. There’s a sign hanging above a culvert that blocks part of the view of this section of the lake, but thankfully for me this male surfaced in plain view with a fish in his mouth.
I’ve seen great blue herons catch a wide a variety of animals at Ridgefield, but most of the fish they catch near the shore are really small, so I was a bit surprised when this heron speared a larger fish at the edge of Long Lake.
The pintails on Horse Lake often keep their distance but sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll swim close to the shore, such as this handsome drake on New Year’s Eve.
I didn’t have much exposure to great blue herons before I moved to Oregon years ago, but the ones I had seen hunted in bodies of water, so I was rather surprised when I moved here and saw herons frequently hunting on land. This young heron, as you can see from its muddy beak, was hunting for voles in a meadow. There’s a little bit of blood at the base of its beak, I’m not sure if it’s from the heron or one of its victims.
A barn swallow takes a break from hunting insects over Long Lake on a rainy spring day. This was one of my favorite spots at the refuge to take pictures, the dead tree to which this branch was attached was close to the road and I spent many hours just sitting in my car watching to see what would swim or walk or fly by, but sadly the tree fell over into the lake.
A marsh wren pulls nesting material from a cattail, soaked on a wet spring afternoon.
A raccoon hunts along the shoreline of Bower Slough.
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.
A yellow-rumped warbler (Myrtle) gets pelted by the rain on a spring afternoon.
A yellow-rumped warbler pauses at the edge of South Quigley Lake on a spring afternoon.
Boolie 