Birds, Birds, Birds . . . and a Nutria
November 30, 2013
Soundtrack:
- Wire Train -- Between Two Words
Saturday was the day for the long drive home. Not before taking in some of the local wildlife, though.
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| Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
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| Great Blue Heron |
I've driven by Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge countless times. It's on the way to the coast and the casino from my parents house. There are few trips I make to Oregon where I don't end up going to one of those two places. I'd never stopped at the refuge before this visit. I had no idea there was so much wildlife so close to my childhood home.
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| Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
I visited
Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge a couple of times in November. There are some interesting similarities and differences. Sacramento has a lot more ducks. The selection was exactly the same, though. In both places I saw mallards, northern pintails and northern shovelers. Both places have a lot of coots. I didn't notice any grebes at Baskett Slough, there are plenty in Sacramento.
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| Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
The goose populations were very different. In Sacramento, there are snow geese, ross' geese and white-fronted geese. It was all canada geese and cackling geese at Baskett Slough. I read that the Willamette Valley is the exclusive wintering home for certain types of canada geese. The goose populations were a lot closer in size between the two refuges than the duck populations.
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| Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
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| Red-tailed Hawk |
Both refuges attract a large number of northern harriers and hawks. I guess they hang around to eat the ducks and coots? I saw a harrier buzz over the ducks and geese a couple of times and the waterfowl scattered when they saw the harrier. The northern harriers I saw in Sacramento all seemed to be interested in the critters in the fields, mice and snakes I assumed. I saw a couple of american kestrels at Baskett Slough.
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| Northern Harrier Buzzing the Geese -- Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
After visiting Baskett Slough, I went back to Salem to have breakfast with the family before heading South for the winter. Before I left the Salem area, though, I stopped at Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge. It was a different experience. There were still a lot of canada/cackling geese (they sure are hard for me to tell apart unless they're right next to each other), but there was a wider variety of other waterfowl and there were bald eagles.
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| Canada Geese (or Are They Cackling Geese?) -- Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
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| Nutria |
Like Baskett Slough, Ankeny didn't have a lot of ducks. It had a wide variety, though. It had mallards, pintails and shovelers, but it also had canvasbacks, buffleheads, hooded mergansers and scaups. I saw a couple of tundra swans at Baskett Slough, but at Ankeny I saw at least a dozen. I also saw a nutria. It's basically a giant South American water rat.
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| Why do I find this picture to be so funny? Tundra Swan -- Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
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| Canvasback |
I always think of swans as being graceful, elegant birds. These swans? Not so much. These swans spent a lot of time with their asses in the air feeding on something beneath the water. Awkward. They were always surround by small fleets of ducks. I suspect the ducks were hoping to grow up to be big and beautiful like the swans some day. Isn't there a story about that?
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| Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
I saw a juvenile bald eagle in a tree as I was leaving the refuge. He posed for a while, and then he was joined by another bald eagle. They flew off together, wrestling in the air as they flew. It reminded me of our dogs. So silly.
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| Bald Eagle -- Ankeny National Wildlife Refuge, OR |
After that I headed home. I took the back way through Oregon, cutting over to Highway 97 at Eugene. It was an uneventful drive. Pretty, though. As always, it was good to get back into California. For the first time, I think I had an appreciation for the beauty of California's Central Valley. It's so different from the forested land I'd been driving through for the last week.
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| Mount Shasta, Highway 97, CA |
I'll spoil the plot right away and tell you I saw a condor, but it was from very far away and I suspected it was actually a turkey vulture until I got home and took a look at the pictures. I saw a bobcat, though, which is definitely cooler than seeing a condor from so far away you're not even sure it's a condor. The cat was under a tree near the East entrance to the park. I don't know if I'd have even seen the cat if I hadn't had bobcats on the brain. See, I saw one on a previous trip here but it got away before I could get a picture off. When I saw the shadow moving beneath that tree I immediately said to Pongo "Bobcat!" Sure enough. The cat was too far away and in poor light for decent pictures, but not-so-great pictures beats no pictures in my book.
I was talking to a ranger about the deer. She said that they're getting a bit muley. She was saying that black-tailed deer are indigenous to the area, but when William Randolph Hearst built his castle in San Simeon he had mule deer shipped in for his wildlife park. Descendants of those deer have proliferated and made their way North. I've heard zebra are still seen occasionally around San Simeon, but I'm not sure that's anything but a myth. The ranger said that there are pronghorn and tule elk living in a remote valley of Pinnacles.
