Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
Despite its short length, the Hall of Mosses Trail in the Hoh Rain Forest provides nice views of nurse logs, fallen trees that provide a beneficial perch for seedlings to take root. As the young trees grow into giants themselves, their roots reach down around the log and into the soil. In time the log rots away, the emptiness that remains a reminder of how life for one tree began with the death of another.
I recently got back from a week of hiking in Washington and made my fourth visit to the Hoh Rain Forest. My fourth dry visit to the Hoh Rain Forest. While it rained heavily during much of my trip, it was warm and sunny during my visit to the Hoh, so I’ll make a return trip this winter to all but guarantee a rainy day.
I wonder if tourists would pay me on sunny days to walk behind them with a watering can held above their head, to better get the full rainforest experience.
Quite a different kestrel picture compared to the previous one I posted, this distant portrait shows a kestrel at work, hovering in place watching for small rodents moving about in the meadow below.
Kestrels are our smallest falcon but late in December of 2010 I was thrilled to see them up close at several locations around the auto tour at Ridgefield. This male was hunting for earthworms beside Canvasback Lake on a rainy Christmas Eve.
A gadwall drake walks across the ice late on a winter afternoon.
I wasn’t sure what I was seeing when I first spotted a dark form walking along the opposite shore on a cold winter morning. It took me a moment to recognize it as a double-crested cormorant as while it’s a bird I’ve seen many times, it’s always been flying or swimming, not walking. I wonder if it was as confused as I was, as we had a rare day cold enough to freeze the water of the slough, icing over its favorite fishing hole.
A northern pintail drake dabbles in the shallow waters of Horse Lake.
A ring-necked duck starts her dive, her bill just breaking the surface of the water in front of her.
Over the past few years I’ve noticed there’s a lone female scaup that sometimes hangs out at Horse Lake. I don’t know if it’s the same bird from year to year, and she often hangs out at the far side of the lake, but it’s always a treat when she swims in close. Unfortunately in this instance I had been photographing diving coots and ducks and to get a high shutter speed was shooting at ISO 3200. That’s higher than I like to push the 7D and the technical quality of the picture suffers a bit for it, but since she was yawning it provides a nice change from my other pictures of her.
I love watching the diving ducks on Horse Lake, like this female scaup starting her dive to search for food under the water. She pushes forward with her flattened tail on the surface of the water and her webbed feet below and breaks the surface of the water with her beak, her body soon to follow. It’s absolute poetry and I’ll never tire of watching it.
Boolie 