Hello Everybody, 13 Nov 2006 I'm back at 'homebase' in Colorado after wandering around the Pacific Northwest during autumn. Nice fall colors! I've put a couple of maps at the beginning of the new slideshow, showing my travels in the 'Lower 48' over the past 5 years, and showing where I've been just recently. EV and I went to see Portland's 'Chimney Swifts' (Vaux's Swifts in the West) in their evening performance, swirling and funneling down into an unused industrial chimney for the night - - their feet are adapted for clinging to a vertical wall rather than perching on bushes and trees. The newspaper claims that as many as 35,000 birds may be roosting for the night! While in Portland I discovered on the internet that there was a Hawkwatch International migration counting project underway in north central Washington, just a few easy days distant. They welcome visitors, so I hauled my big camera up there hoping for some good pictures of the hawks as they flew down the ridge on their migration. It was not to be! They either were too far away, or were zooming around just 30-40 feet away checking out the decoy owl put up to attract them (they do not like owls). The trappers and banders kindly brought out northern harrier they had just netted, measured, and banded, and let me hold it and then release it. Next I moved back to Oregon for the birding locations along the northern part of the Pacific coast. I didn't see a whole lot, but pelicans flying along the beach cliffs did produce some ok pictures. And some of the best were of crows at a picnic site. EV and I then spent a week back around Hells Canyon where I had such a great time a few weeks earlier. EV is good at spotting little birds, and at a lunch stop she found a Dipper which was feeding in the middle of a whitewater stream: they 'fly' underwater with their wings, walking along the bottom. This one was barely dipping under the surface, perfect for photographs. We were disappointed to find another vehicle parked at a favorite campsite perched on the edge of Hells Canyon, but when we saw it was a Ranger's we thought perhaps they were not camping there overnight, so we squeezed in around them, prepared to move if necessary - - fortunately, when the Ranger returned she said we were fine there and she was leaving. Next I went up near Mt. St. Helens, hoping for some good pictures with the long lens - - the mountain was in the clouds so that didn't work out, but it was still interesting to see the tremendous areas of trees blowndown in 1980. I then skirted to the east of the Seattle/Tacoma megopolis, staying close to the mountains on small roads, to get to the beautiful North Cascades Highway, which crosses Washington not far south of the Canadian border. Just east of the Cascades I turned back on a Forest Service gravel road and climbed several thousand feet to Harts Pass, the highest driveable in Washington, for some really nice panoramic views of the extremely rugged Cascade crest. In the Colorado mountains the Aspen turning yellow are so spectacular in the autumn, in northern Washington, Idaho, and Montana the Western Larch is similar and sometimes covers whole mountainsides, contrasting nicely with the green conifers. I walked out of a supermarket to find an 'Amphicar' parked in the lot - - seemed straight out of a 1955 Popular Mechanics magazine. I couldn't resist a few pictures. A couple of years ago I saw bison at the National Bison Range in northwestern Montana - - since then I learned it is also a good birding spot; the mountain loop road was closed for the winter so I did not see any bison, but the wetland area was fun to bird in. Through 'friends of friends' I was lucky to be able to visit Kate Davis at her Raptors of the Rockies bird rehabilitation and educational center, just south of Missoula MT. She has around a dozen hawks and owls who have been injured (mostly being hit by cars) and who would not be able to survive in the wild, and over the last few years she's taken her birds and given over a thousand presentations to schoolchildren, hopefully enhancing habitat and bird preservation. She's published a very fine book, and has an interesting website http://www.raptorsoftherockies.org Most of the birds are in individual or paired huts, but Sibley the Peregrine Falcon was perched by the coffee table in Kate's living room! I tagged along behind my friend Warren Guffin hunting for elk in the Montana mountains - - it was nice to get out in the snow, but not surprisingly we did not see any elk. Most of the birding books rave about Red Rock Lakes NWR, in south central Montana, where the Trumpeter Swan was rescued from near extinction in the 'Lower 48'. It's a basin surrounded by beautiful mountains, very remote, and low-key. Although it was not the optimum time of year to visit, there were several thousand Trumpeter and Tundra Swans, quite near the pleasant little camping area (which I had all to myself) so you can hear them all night long. The Tundra Swan's muttering is much like the geese and crane noise which I've heard so much at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, but the Trumpeter Swan is something else entirely. They sound a bit like the brass section of an orchestra warming up, with lots of little toots from trumpets, french horns, and trombones. Here are the same old instructions for the slideshow: http://www.firestardesign.com/johna (Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my email address change to be just 'john') The new slideshow is < 06 Sep Oct Northwest.exe > Most of you will be using Internet Explorer: you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I have used my updated PC-cillin to be sure the .exe file is virus free, and in this case you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous <.exe> files'. Right-Arrow or Right-Click will advance to the next picture Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the previous picture Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc if the show seems stuck If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic to download these large files please let me know, as it is very easy for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the individual images, just let me know. I have limited space on firestardesign.com, so must sometimes remove older slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to send you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them from 2004-2006 along with their accompanying eMails, on CD. And if you don't want to get any more eMails like this one in the future, just let me know. And if you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to add them to my eMail list. Regards, John Armitage