2008 September 10, from Portland, Oregon Hello, Everybody, Hooray!! I'm a Grandpa now. Lewis was born early on 9/9, and Amy and Tom are very awed and happy. Although first babies are traditionally late and labor long, Lewis arranged to be early and quick. They went to a Boston birthing center rather than a hospital, and were very pleased with the midwives and the atmosphere there. Labor and delivery were in a large 'bathtub' which Amy liked very much. I can hardly wait to visit to Boston toward the end of the year. I've spent the past couple of months slowly wandering around southern and western Oregon, and northwest and north-central Nevada, usually spending several days at each campsite, sometimes birding heavily, daily hiking and 'flowering', and reading usually a book a day. I found used bookshops in a couple of small towns which had stacks of paperbacks for $0.10 and $0.50, many of them good books and just what I like, so it was easy to really load up. When I started this trip in early July the temperature in Portland at near sea-level was 95 degrees, and in the sun the camper is like an oven, so I headed up the Columbia Gorge to reach the high ground in southern Washington's national forest - - getting up to 5,000 feet and in the shade makes things bearable. And I'm finding that even better than terrific scenery outside my windows, is being surrounded by trees and branches up close on both sides and the back, so when I glance outside I feel really immersed in the forest. The BLM Cabin Lake campground is publicized as a good birding place, and it really paid off for me. It's not a organized campground, just several acres of Ponderosa glades with many little tracks to level areas where people camp, and with a few picnic tables scattered around. There are two blinds with little pools of water 10-20 feet outside the viewing ports, which attract a lot of birds and make for great photographs. In fact the distance is so short that on the larger birds I was only able to get 'head and shoulder' pictures rather that the entire bird. And the area was loaded with large June Beetles hovering around at about knee height, droning along like little helicopters, and when one landed near the water I was able to photograph it. A specific goal for that birding site was Lewis's Woodpecker, a rather uncommon species but often found there;, it has muted colors rather than the bold colors of most woodpeckers. When I first drove into the camping area I was thrilled to see a Lewis's land on a tree right up through the truck windshield - - wow! The photographs were mostly in deep shade, so the colors are a even a little more murky than they should be. Farther south, near the California border, I met a young couple who are recent Biology graduates, working for the summer for a birding conservation organization. Craig from Albuquerque and Marie-C from Quebec. Each day they spend the 6 hours after dawn catching birds in mist nets at specific locations, banding and measuring them and looking for parasites, taking cloacal swabs for laboratory checking for avian flu and other diseases, and determining their age and sex. By comparing the numbers from the same sites each year, long term trends can be inferred. They let me join them for a very interesting couple of hours, and I was impressed with their professionalism; their bird bander's handbooks for identification make our usual field guides look like kindergarten toys. I am so used to seeing tiny birds through magnifying optics, it was a shock to see how tiny they really are. Sometimes it is a difficult and lengthy process to untangle them from the net, very close up and fiddly work. Just before I arrived at their site, Marie-C was intently working on releasing a little bird, essentially motionless and silent and focused on her task, when she sensed something behind her - - she turned her head to find a large black bear looking at her within an arm's length! As soon as the bear realized the situation if turned and ran away - - presumably its curiosity and poor eyesight had led it to approach this mysterious motionless strange object, and it was startled to find it was a live person. For those especially interested in bird banding, I've put a short slideshow on the server in addition to the main one: Marie-C and Craig 08July.exe EV joined me for a long weekend after Labor Day, and we had great fun making return visits to Cabin Lake and Thompson Lake as well as another nice campsite higher up in the Cascades. Cabin Lake was swarming with very raucous Pinyon Jays, we could often look out the camper window and see a dozen hopping around just a few feet away from the camper, scrounging any debris they could find from previous campers. Pinyon Jays are regulars at Cabin Lake, but an unexpected bonus was a flock of female Western Bluebirds, who were especially energetic bathing in the little pool at the blind. Overall we had a great weekend, seeing 48 bird species, 7 new for EV and 1 for me - - EV spotted a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers for me in the forest where the guidebook said to look for them, and these were my primary summer goal as I 'should' have seen them long ago considering the other birds on my life list. And they are very large woodpeckers with an impressive long neck and bright red crest, quite different from other woodpeckers, and very nice to see. I'll soon be wandering through Oregon, Nevada, and Utah to join my friends Bill and Jennifer (from Sierra Vista AZ), for an October week's camping in the 'Arizona Strip', that part of Arizona between Utah and the Grand Canyon. The first week of November is a repeat trip on the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands NP, hoping to match the great time I had last year. EV and I are thinking of a week in Big Bend NP (TX) next spring, a place not only with great scenery and blooming desert plants, but with several species of birds very hard or impossible to find anywhere else in the USA. The server address is still: http://www.meetmarsha.com/john The new slideshow is: 08 07 08 Jul Aug OR NV This slideshow is LARGE! Many pictures. I've applied jpeg shrinkage to the file sizes in two batches, and on 3/4 of the pictures, ones without smoothly varying areas where it's possible to do so without degradation, I've applied extra shrinking to minimize the size for download. Each browser is a little different, but generally you can either choose OPEN to view the show once, or choose SAVE TO DISK and then OPEN if you want to have it your hard drive for future re-viewing. I have used my up-to-date Zone Alarm to be sure the .exe files are virus free, so you can safely ignore Windows's warning about 'dangerous <.exe> files'. Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar 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 ever seems stuck. If you don't have a high-speed Internet connection it's not realistic to download these large files on a phone line 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, perhaps to print, just let me know. I have limited space on the server, so must periodically 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 2004-2008 along with their accompanying emails, on CDs. And if you don't want to get any more emails like this one in the future, just let me know. If you have friends who might be interested, I'll be happy to add them to my email list and they can download the slideshows if they have a Windows computer. None of this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the pictures, the better. Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-9809