West of the Cascades

The check-off list results of a couple of hours of walking the board walk through Jackson-Frazier Wetland, and other environs between Portland and Corvallis are shown below.

a. Brewer's blackbird
b. Red-winged blackbird (female)
c. American crow
d. Western scrub jay
e. Dark-eyed junco
f. Bewick's wren
g. Glaucus-winged gull
h. Mallard duck
i. Rough-legged hawk
j. Rock pigeon
k. Dusky goose
l. Purple finch
m. Red-tailed hawk
n. American robin

It was a nice late-morning to slowly work my way around the wetland between 10:00 and noon. The view was difficult for the birds perched high in the trees when I faced east and south. Since I hadn't been to the wetland before, I didn't know what to expect. The meandering board walk "trails" were great, and since they are elevated, it would be easy to move through the area any time of the year. There were a number of vegetation assemblages in this western Oregon wetland habitat to observe that ranged from a brush woodland to Willamette Valley Wet Prairie.

I had taken my National Geographic Field Guide of Birds of North America (hard cover version) - that was a mistake. It was too large to fit easily in my coat pocket, and had too many choices to look through when I tried to make an identification. There were a number of small-sized species that I hadn't seen before, and the female red-winged blackbird through me off for a while. Mallards among the cat tail reeds played hide-and-seek as I tried to get close to them. The male red-winged blackbird had a distinctive call that I was able to learn by watching and listening. There were a lot of other calls that I didn't know - it would have been helpful to have an experienced birder along for the watching (and listening). After getting back to my car, I drove to the Border's Bookstore on Ninth Street, and bought copies of Birds of Oregon Field Guide, and Field Guide to Birds: Washington & Oregon - the later was on sale and only cost $2.99. Either would have been helpful and easy to handle while watching - next time.

Sudden Snow

We travel back west every December,
Home for Christmas,
Grown kids and and grand children in their homes,
No house of our own.

Early-morning drive to BWI,
Connecting flights through Midwest cities,
Hoping for good weather,
Eventually landing at PDX.

Whether clouds or not,
There, out the window, when
The plane gets low enough to the ground,
Postage-stamp-sized farm fields come into view.

Subtle brown earth tones where vegetables will grow in summer,
Accented dark and light-green hues of Douglas firs and lichen-covered oaks,
The approach skirts the Columbia River,
Parallel to the runways.

Oregon on this side, Washington the other,
Only minutes earlier Mount Hood was eye level,
Adams, Rainier, and Saint Helens peak above,
Rolling mountains beside and beyond.

No matter how settled we feel in the east,
Living so far away from what is still familiar,
Even without our own house to gather,
This place we still call home.

Hoar frost on trees in the
Willamette Valley, Oregon

It is funny how such simple weather phenomena as hoar frost still catches my attention. I first saw it in Oregon - white edged everything in view - when driving back from California from Christmas, right before New Year 1979. We had driven straight through from Visalia, and it was 13° in Corvallis when we pulled into town around 1:00 AM. Our house was so cold that we could see our breath, and when climbed into bed, our blanket crackled with little lightning bolts. Fortunately the pipes hadn't frozen - we never did that again. The last time I saw hoar frost was in Albany right before New Years. Driving from my daughter's house for some guest supplies, past Waverly Park, everything was tinged in frost - like over 30 years ago - but in the time going and returning from Costco, the white dust was rapidly disappearing - gone like years past.

Long Ways from Home

It is funny how seeing something triggers a thought. A couple of weeks ago while I was commuting to work on Route 50, I saw an orange "O" like this on the back of a car in front of me. My first thought was an "O" for Oregon State. Re-calibrating for present geography, I made the correction that this was an "O" for the Baltimore Orioles baseball team, not the OSU Beavers. When I first started driving in the D.C. Metro area, I had to make similar adjustments when seeing freeway signs for "Washington" which meant District of Columbia, not State of Washington - as in the northern neighbor of Oregon that is at most 300 miles away when in the south of the state, not 3,000 as when in Annapolis on the Chesapeake Bay. The same was when I first saw LAX in Annapolis - why so many bumper stickers indicating Los Angeles International Airport? Oh! - lacrosse, the game that every kid here plays like Oregon kids play soccer.

As mentioned in a previous blog about the Washington Irving Biography (named for the General who the District, the State, and a county in Oregon are named as well), the eastern hardwoods are a novelty to me. The forests here in the mid-Atlantic region are unlike the western Oregon woods that are dominated by Douglas Fir with oaks mixed in which still have a pale green appearance in winter from the bearded lichens that hang from the limbs. Back here in Maryland while driving Route 50 every week, I see the progression of the four different seasons displayed in the stands of trees, with autumn's rich mosaic of red, orange, and yellow colors the annual crown. What turned out to be a surprise for me has been the phases of color changes in spring, with different species leafing at different times, and light-colored leaves darkening into deeper shades of green. All the time this is happening, the housing and business areas that are off the freeway and which don't change color with the seasons, become less and less visible and eventually are naturally camouflaged by the time June is here. However, six months later, with all leaves on the ground and none any longer floating in the air, the different shaped and colored stems stand in ranks but are alone, with branches indistinguishable among their crowns.

It is also funny how different people from the same family describe the winter trees here: my wife, longing for the evergreen woods of Oregon, uses stark to describe the woods during this time of the year; my son, the diplomat, prefers to describe their condition as barren. As for me, I speed back and forth from work where as many as ten lanes cut through woods, hoping my speed doesn't drop below 65 miles per hour so my 29 miles can be covered in 35 minutes - a sight far different and far distant from my Oregon commute at 25 mph, not even thinking much about the three miles of two lanes winding up hills and around bends, ending up in a parking lot full of cars bearing the other orange "O".