Willow and I had a short camping trip to the Highlands last week. We cut it short by a day when the weather got too unsettled and the neighbors too noisy. That’s the problem with campgrounds – you never know what kind of neighbors you might get. We hiked and I paddled my kayak and I went birding while Willow waited, impatiently.
There were also loons and other water birds and I’ll post them soon.
The girls and I and our friends, Beth and Fern, went to our favorite camping place in the Okanogan Highlands last week and had a fun time despite lots of rain. One day, it rained for five straight hours, not just a light rain, but hard rain where you don’t even want to consider going outside. The trailer stayed dry inside, well, maybe it was damp from wet dogs and people and condensation but we were more or less dry. All that rain is good for wildflowers and green growing things. We did manage to do quite a bit of walking and birding and botanizing. And we read books. One day, we sat under a tree with a big canopy and stayed dry while it rained and hailed and then the birds came to us.
I photographed this pair last month when they were still on a nest. Presumably, at that time they had one or two eggs and since then someone did see them with one youngster. However when we were there recently, there were no babies. A Bald Eagle probably took them. It’s hard work to raise kids.
In the first photo, I thought the bird was sleeping but on closer inspection, you can see the red eye watching me. Both birds were resting in the middle of the lake so I moved on in my kayak, looking at other birds and enjoying the day. I paddled back into a marshy area where I often see Ring-necked Ducks and American Coots and if I’m lucky, I get good views of tiny warblers too. This time I found both Common Loons in the shallow water. I kept my boat as still as possible and they both approached me, diving often and popping up in front or behind me. It was exciting to watch them underwater! They never seemed to come up with food so I don’t know what they were doing except maybe showing off? They did not appear distressed and they did not make any calls. They were very interested in a patch of cattails and I wondered if it was even possible that they had a little one stashed in there, hidden from danger but I never saw any movement in the vegetation. Perhaps they were just enjoying a rare sunny spell.
Most of these images are not cropped, shot with a 200-500 mm lens from my boat.
Oh yeah, I still think those little ground squirrels are just the cutest.
Common Loons need lots of water surface to get airborne and then, at a small lake like this one, they need to circle it two or three times to get high enough to clear the tall trees. It’s all pretty dramatic.
My Everyday Photos 