From near Portland, OR 2016 Jun 15 Hello Everybody, These last five months have been 'as usual': camping in the boonies, driving backroads, and photographing birds. I spent three days in southeast Arizona at the group of five ponds and small lakes near Wilcox, hoping to see the single Eurasian Wigeon which had been reported recently, but looking for one bird mixed with around five thousand similar American Wigeon spread over a wide area and moving around was not fruitful. However, many nice views of the American Wigeon. In early spring I was lucky to see a Gila Monster, around eighteen inches long, crossing the sandy road into the desert scrub -- first one I've ever seen in 10-15 years wandering Arizona. They spend most of their time underground, and their bites are painfully but not fatally unpleasant. I passed through the mountains of central Idaho on the way to Oregon from Colorado, and in the several years since last being there I'd forgotten how gorgeous that country is -- full of snow-capped mountain ranges and large fast rivers, and not many people. I hoped to camp on the northeast side of Mt. St. Helens to revisit sites from around ten years ago, but of the three possible roads into there, one was washed out and the other two were snowbound. After spending so much time in southeastern Arizona I need to recalibrate to the high country. At Ridgefield NWR, just north of Vancouver WA, I was confidently told by another birder to be on the lookout for an albino muskrat with young, and a bit later another birder said to watch out for the albino beaver with young, and I finally did see the albino Nutria which is what I had been suspecting all along. She had five little ones at the edge of the stream, some of them riding on her shoulders occasionally, and busily foraging near her in the water and on the shore. EV and I birded Stigerwald NWR, just across the Columbia River on the Washington shore, and the prize of the day was seeing close-up an American Bittern intently stalking along a log in the shallows. There was no way to get a good view without grass stems in the way, but just shooting through them did produce a usable photograph. The server address is: http://john-armitage.com The new slideshow (at the top of the list) is: 16_01-06_Jan_Jun_AZ_ID_OR and the equivalent in .zip format for Mac users. This email is also repeated there in .txt format. Boilerplate follows: 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. 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-armitage.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 the first jpg file and then all of the jpg files, using Cmd+A (select with this method only, to keep the files in numeric order) use the space-bar for a Quick View slideshow click the tiny circle with the backslash through it near the upper left corner for full screen (in Yosemite and El Capitan) 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 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