From Newport, on the Oregon coast / 2014 August 7

Hello, Everybody,

After a busy winter and spring, I have been enjoying taking it easy.
Lots of wandering around and camping for several days before moving on,
lots of book reading, photography, and Photoshop time. The new Canon
'pro' 1DX body and 400/4 DO lens are working out extremely well, and
working at 800 mm gives me a bit better image quality than I could get
at the 420 mm I was using with my lighter setup, especially noticeable
on little birds far away. And I've been quite surprised how well the
iPhone 5S camera does for wide-angle shots -- all of the images in the
new slideshow which are not long telephoto are from the iPhone.

I found one good picture which should have been in the last slideshow,
and I used it to start the new one. Soon after I arrived in Portland, EV
took me for a very nice birding afternoon at a new place: Cooper
Mountain, in the Beaverton suburb of Portland, a quite wild place in the
midst of such a busy area.

A report on the Oregon Birding Online List (OBOL) daily email reported a
dozen American Three-toed Woodpeckers seen on the southern flank of Mt.
Adams, just north of the Columbia River in Washington north of Mt. Hood.
There is a burned area at around 5,400 feet elevation which is several
miles in extent, from the 2003 B&B fire, and many woodpeckers love such
burned areas. I've been trying to see this particular woodpecker for
around 5 years, and although EV has seen it while on camping weekends
with me, I've always missed it. So I hustled up to the camping area at
the trailhead for the South Climb of the mountain, where midweek there
were around 150 cars! I didn't see the dozen birds reported, but the one
I did see was enough. Here's the view of the mountain from this area,
copied from the internet:



I swung back through Portland for a day with EV at Pittock Mansion, a
nice museum in a steep forested part of Portland, which has extensive
exotic flower gardens which are attractive to hummingbirds. We cut our
visit short when thunderstorms all around became too threatening. Next,
OBOL reported a Sooty Grouse with chicks seen on an isolated dirt road
on the way up to the Cascade Range, and since I had in mind to spend a
couple of weeks camping and birding near Sisters on the eastern side of
the range, the grouse made a good target for on the way. They had been
reported near 'Three Pools', a well-known local attraction in spite of
its isolation. Another case of many dozens of cars in the parking lot,
and many swimmers hanging out in the creek pools, but as I walked
through the parking lot to depart a couple of the grouse chicks strolled
across the pavement toward the surrounding bushes and trees which were
sheltering their mama.

As I approached the high ground near the top of the Cascades, I could
see a huge smoke plume rising near Mt. Jefferson. Checking on the
internet, I found that the thunderstorms we had seen a couple of days
before had caused something like 30,000 lightning strikes across central
Oregon, and there were 15 large fires growing rapidly in the 90º+ windy
weather; one fire was exactly where I had thought to go near Sisters.
Fortunately for me, the wind was from the west and was blowing all the
smoke east, leaving a lot of good places to go on the western slope of
the mountains. The smoke eventually caused haze and poor air quality in
the state of Maine!

I camped at a primitive spot with little Fay lake just outside my
tailgate -- there was the thickest population of dragonflies I've even
seen, and some of my best pictures were shot from my tailgate of my
camper above cardboard someone had left on the fire ring just below. EV
had just given me a great book, Dragonflies and Damselflies of Oregon,
which made it great fun trying to figure out what they were. I had never
known before that Damselflies are much like Dragonflies, but they perch
with their wings alongside their bodies rather than spread wide as with
Dragonflies.

After a couple of nights at Fay Lake, I moved a few miles south to one
of the 19 Lost Lakes in Oregon, and spent a very nice week there
exploring the extensive grassy and reedy area around the lake which was
not at high water. In addition to a few birds and more dragonflies, the
lake was surrounded by tens of thousands of Western Toads, tiny little
things usually much less than an inch long. In some areas they were so
thick it was difficult to walk without stepping on them, and since they
hopped slowly away as I approached most of my picture attempts were
'butt shots'. By using the long lens and perseverance, I was able to get
a few profile views. One of the first pictures I took seemed very
strange: the little toad had only three legs, and it looked like a foot
structure was growing on his lips or from his mouth! I phoned a
biologist at the Fish and Wildlife office, and he told me that these
toads are known for their explosive breeding which produces such amazing
numbers all at once, and that chemical or parasite damage to them in
their tadpole stage often caused such defects -- he was quite interested
in my picture.

EV had a weekend to go camping with me, and since it was in the 90ºs
over most of the state and smokey to the east, it seemed a good idea to
go to the coast where the forecast was for the 60ºs. I found a pretty
spot to camp at an RV park four miles inland from the ocean with the
Siletz River thirty feet from our tailgate, and EV drove down from
Portland to join me. The coast was TOO cold, with a foggy 25 mph wind
onshore! But we found some nice spots inland a bit where it was much
nicer, and saw a fair mix of little birds. The BirdsEye app for eBird
reported the Pacific Wren seen inland in the coastal mountains at Drift
Creek Falls, which turned out to be yet another of these very isolated
Oregon spots where you expect to see maybe 5 people, and arrive to find
a parking area of several acres with many dozens of cars. It was a long
downhill trail to the falls, very pretty and surprisingly not crowded
with people. But essentially no birds to see, although EV could hear
little birds up high in the trees. Halfway back up the trail, she
spotted what looked like a wren, and when I played the Pacific Wren's
song on my iPhone we were surrounded by 2 or 3 little birds circling us
very excitedly and perching too close for me to focus the camera on.
Then one returned the same song, hurray!  And then EV spotted that they
were going to a woodpecker hole in a nearby tree, and when we looked
there we could see the gaping yellow mouths of two tiny chicks! That
definitely made the day. And the week. A life bird for me And the next
day a short time at the beach, in milder conditions, produced one bird
to look at, but it was a life bird for EV, a Semipalmated Plover. So we
had a very good weekend.

Remember, these large files may take several minutes to download; while
waiting to get a really fast uplink in Santa Cruz, Joey has migrated me
to the commercial host ICDSoft, which will greatly speed things up for
those of you who have a fast download connection. There has been a
myriad of opportunities for typographic errors in putting up all the
older slideshows; please let me know if you run into any problems.

The new server address is:     http://john-armitage.com

The new slideshow (at the top of the list) is: 14_07_Jul_OR.exe and the
equivalent in .zip format for Mac users.

If you can easily change your screen brightness, you might optimize it
for the best viewing.

NEW: For Mac users there is a .zip file to download, and here is how to
use it (please let me know if you have any problems):

go to    http://john.qued.com/   and click on the blue line for a list
of slideshows

click on a zip file for a slideshow

after downloading, open the zip file

open the extracted folder which will be in the same folder and have the
same name as the zip file (likely in Downloads)

select all of the jpg files, using Cmd+A (select with this method only,
to keep them in order)

use the space-bar for a Quick View slideshow

use the spread arrows in the upper right corner for full screen

don't click the menu bar, it will disappear

use the right and left arrow keys to navigate

use Escape to exit full screen

optional: delete the zip and/or extracted folder

Boilerplate follows: 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.

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 would like any of the individual images, perhaps to print, just
let me know. If you don't want to get any more emails like this one in
the future, please 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 broadband internet connection.
None of this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the
pictures, the better.

Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-6080 john@qued.com