Washington – Page 38

Make a Joyful Noise

But let all who take refuge in you be glad; let them ever sing for joy.
Psalm 5:11

The bullfrogs were singing in rare form at the refuge this weekend. Breeding season was in full swing and the males were croaking and wrestling and leapfrogging each other, and a few lucky ones were mating with the females. They were in a channel beside Bull Lake so I had to shoot down on them between the tall grass. Between a gentle breeze that constantly moved the grass about and my temporary bout of photographic incompetence, it took me a while to settle in and find my way.

This male was one of my favorites. I wanted to catch the ripples made by his croaking but was a bit surprised that my favorite view of the ripples is before his throat fully expands. The problem was that by the time his throat is fully extended, the ripples interfered with each other as they bounced off his rear legs, breaking up the pattern.

Beautiful creature, this one. Beautiful.

In This Quiet Hush

A cinnamon teal pair settles in as the light fades at the end of the day. A simple but peaceful picture, one of my favorites from this past winter.

A Bad Case of the Boolies

You’d think I’d never held a camera before.

I don’t know why exactly but some days I struggle mightily with exposure, with focus, with stability, with aim, with composition, with equipment, with everything. What works for me is to work through it. To keep taking picture after picture until despite my efforts I get one that I like, then more and more until I get one I love.

This past Sunday was a fun day to be at Ridgefield, full of new animal behaviors I either hadn’t seen or at least not photographed, but I couldn’t take a picture to save my life. One highlight was spotting a juvenile black phoebe, a bird I had only seen one once before while vacationing in New Mexico. This species is normally a resident of areas well to our south so I was excited to see it once more. So excited that I botched the exposure on every picture save the last.

I never saw it again.

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.

It Turns Out, I Can Be Wrong

This bald eagle pair has been courting at Ridgefield each spring but I always assumed they nested elsewhere. Apparently not. I had never seen a bald eagle nest before — it was massive. The two youngsters rested while their parents kept a watchful eye from a nearby tree. The young eagles looked pretty big, I suspect they’ll fledge soon, but I could be wrong. Again.

Wonderland

When we moved to Oregon, my wife and I would sometimes go out for a drive just to get the lay of the land. One day as she was driving and I was navigating, we were heading south and looking for a good place to turn around. The map showed that we could take one highway into Junction City and then take a different route back north, so we decided to do that. On the way out of town we crossed over a river and at a glance I thought I spied a bald eagle atop a large tree.

I assumed it was a decoy, like those placed to scare off pigeons and geese, but a second glance confirmed that this was a living, breathing eagle. My first! I leaned back in my seat and wondered what sort of wonderland we had just moved to, where you could drive down an ordinary highway and see bald eagles in the trees.

We’d see more eagles over the years, including one on our honeymoon perched over the Rogue River, but they were mostly occasional glimpses until I discovered Ridgefield. Eagles are common there in winter and spring, most of the close views are of younger eagles but occasionally you’ll get a good view of an adult.

Even so, I was speechless when I made a return to Ridgefield in April after being sidelined with a bum ankle and found this adult on a dead snag in Long Lake, right beside the road. There’s close and then there’s close. I eased the car up behind another that had already stopped and watched the eagle in the wind and the rain. It hung around for another 15 minutes before taking off for the interior of the refuge.

Every time I think I should spend less time at Ridgefield, because I do spend an awful lot of time there, my little wonderland offers up a surprise like this and keeps me coming back for more.

I had another nice surprise when we visited the auto show in January. I had started to do some research before the show and had some vehicles in mind that I wanted to see, but my wife and I agreed just to walk around and look at everything. Which was fortunate because otherwise I wouldn’t have stopped at the Lexus booth.

But there it sat at the edge of their display, a gorgeous little hatchback, and I was smitten. I walked around to the placard and saw it was a hybrid, got pretty good gas mileage even in the city, and while a bit expensive wasn’t out of reach. It had some nice touches like a memory system not just for the seats but also the mirrors and telescoping steering wheel. It had the new knee airbags for both driver and passenger. Turn indicators on the side mirrors. Whiplash-reducing seats. And the staff didn’t think it beeped when it backed up the way the Prius does.

And there it was. A great car for Ridgefield. A great car for my commute. I had found my next car.

But then I got home and did more research and it’s luster began to fade. It turns out it does beep like the Prius when you put it in reverse and you can’t eliminate it entirely. And it also has a new pedestrian warning system that makes these oddball sounds when you’re moving otherwise silently in electric mode.

My quiet Ridgefield car was gone.

And that nice memory system that would make it easy for both my wife and I to drive the car? In our area it’s only available as part of a $6400 package full of other things I don’t care about. And despite the tone of the Lexus advertising, it wasn’t any faster than the Prius.

I’ve been mentally sorting the cars we look at into a tiered list, and suddenly the little Lexus started falling fast. My heart keeps shoving it back up the list but my brain keeps shoving it back down. For now the brain is winning and the Lexus isn’t even in the top tier, but my heart is OK with that as it’s convinced that with one test drive the little hybrid’s charms will overcome all objections, even that infernal beeping and the high cost.

My brain is equally convinced it won’t.

If the time comes to replace the Civic, we’ll see which one was right. My money’s on the …

The Quiet American

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.
Graham Greene, The Quiet American

When I first had in mind to replace my 2001 Honda Civic, I was thinking about avoiding the maintenance and reliability issues that come with old cars, about improved safety of new models, about getting back to the hatchback form factor that I love to an admittedly irrational degree, about maybe even switching to an all-wheel drive model.

But as much as anything what I really wanted was a nice quiet car for the auto tour at Ridgefield. And as far as Ridgefield cars go, the new little Toyota Prius c is at the top of my list.

It’s not a plug-in hybrid and would need to run the gas engine for much of the loop around the refuge, but that’s OK, where I really want the quiet of an electric car is when I need to move the car over very short distances at very slow speeds, such as when I was photographing this hunting coyote, one of a pair that slowly worked the marsh for Townsend’s voles on a rainy winter’s day. They were comfortable with me and paid me little heed, but even so I cringed whenever I had to start the car and disturb the stillness of the early morning.

It is easy to cross from one front seat to the next in the baby Prius, perfect for when I want to photograph from the passenger’s side of the car. It’s nice and short and narrow, good for parking along sections where there isn’t much room for other cars to get by. Plus it gets crazy good gas mileage in the stop-and-go conditions that define the auto tour (I typically move about in the 2 to 5 mph range, with a top speed of 10 mph or so, and lots of starting and stopping).

And best of all, it doesn’t make an annoying beep when it backs up the way the rest of the Prius family does.

But sadly our visit to the Portland Auto Show at the start of the year diminished my enthusiasm for the car. While the exterior of the car seemed nice as long as you spring for the alloy wheels, the interior seemed a bit cheap. But such is my love for Ridgefield that the Prius c remains in my top tier of cars should I decide the time has come to say goodbye to the Civic.

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.

The Wet Fisher

It rained, then poured. The king and I, we waited.