Birds of Grays Harbor: A Hoquiam (Wash.) Walk

Tuesday afternoon I took a photographic ramble through my hometown of Hoquiam, Wash., to near the city limits on the bay of Grays Harbor, about a two mile journey.

I went looking for birds. The Grays Harbor estuary is a "is a major staging area for migrating shorebirds on the Pacific Flyway, visited by over 500,000 shorebirds during spring and fall."^(source) Unfortunately, not thinking when I headed out on the spur of the moment, I picked the wrong time of day to catch many migrating birds. At two and three in the afternoon on a nice day, they're migrating, not seeking shelter in the estuary. But I did catch some good shots of our year round residents, and one notable return resident.

Usually on my photographic rambles in Hoquiam I pick a location, a park or particular area on the bay, start out with my wide angle lens to photograph the landscape, and then switch to my 75-300mm zoom lens for wildlife shots. This journey was all about the wildlife (all birds). I used the zoom lens for all the shots and covered about five (depending how I categorize) of my favorite spots. I'll link to posts that cover those areas so you can see the context, if you're curious.

Hoquiam River Loop

I started photographing along the Hoquiam River Loop in town, right next to the mayor's office and the dock for our tug boats. On the day after Easter, I ran across the first goslings of spring in that little triangle of grass above, and since then I have frequently seen that same family nibbling there. Those first goslings have reached their awkward adolescent (ugly duckling, to my mind) stage, but now two more families, with new babies, have started to gather in this spot.

It's a perfect opportunity to photograph geese in their three life phases in one shot – don't they look like different species at each stage?

In the river by that triangle of grass where the geese hang out, between the tugboats and the riverbank, a great blue heron plied the waters.

I find herons to be elegant and graceful in the way they move in spite of their gangly legs and neck. When I first started with photography for Hive (Steem, back then), I had only a point-and-shot Canon without much zoom capability. I have probably hundreds of shots of a heron flying away as I tried to get close enough to photograph it. Now, with the zoom lens, I can hang back just enough that I don't disturb them (though this one was still keeping an eye on me).

The Rail Yard

I continued along the river not seeing many birds, except for the goose in the headline photo. At Simpson Avenue Bridge I left the path to trespass through the rail yard. I often photograph the riverbank beyond Simpson, but that's slick, treacherous going and I was making time to get to the bay, so I took a shortcut.

It seemed a couple of geese had the same idea, passing through the rail yard from one section of riverbank to another.

I almost captured a killdeer on a pile of gravel in the rail yard. I say almost because the killdeer is not quite as in focus as the rocks are.

Dog Marsh

By following the train tracks, I arrived at the entrance to Dog Marsh, bordered by the Hoquiam River and Grays Harbor bay. I walked along the gravel path atop the embankment on the outside of the marsh, and discovered two cormorants drying their wings on a log at the mouth of the river. (Rennie Island in the bay serves as a backdrop.)

That seagull insisted on photobombing my shot of the cormorants, drifting back and forth in front of the log they perched on. I waited and waited for it to leave, and finally just decided to include it.

The gravel path curves around to follow the bay west at the mouth of the river. At the curve I took another shot of the cormorants (finally sans seagull!), with the Port of Grays Harbor terminal in the background. I couldn't quite get high enough to separate the top of the one cormorant's head from the riverbank in the composition.

Inside the marsh, a Savannah sparrow briefly perched on a weed. If you expand the photo, you can see the yellow stripe above its eye, which is a distinguishing feature of this species of sparrow. ^(source)

A Regal Interlude

From Dog Marsh I returned to the railroad tracks, walking the ties to get to Eighth Street and Earley Industrial Way, which serves as a kind of bypass around the residential neighborhoods of Hoquiam. The plan was to walk about a mile along the road to Fifth Street and Old Cannery Park on the bay, where I thought I would surely run across some shorebirds.

But, first, just before Eighth Street, I encountered this robin looking regal in the grass behind the drivers' license branch.

It's fascinating how the robin perches on one leg with the other curled up. When I was working up the photos, I thought at first that our regal robin was missing a leg. But the final photo of this series (with some kind of out of focus sparrow) shows it has two.

Old Cannery Park

Earley Industrial Way passes over grassed upland well off the bay to Fifth Street, which passes through a sparsely built industrial park to meet the bay again at Old Cannery Park. I either didn't see many birds as I walked along the road, or I was so eager to get to the park, where I thought I might meet up with a flock of migrating birds, that I didn't didn't notice any.

I took immediate notice as soon as a vista opened on the bay at the edge of the park.

A Caspian tern hovered about 20 feet above the water, not more than 25 yards out from shore.

The Caspian tern is by far the most exotic bird I've captured in a photo in my eight years of photography. I don't think I've ever seen one, let alone photograph one. In preparing this post, I thought sure the tern was one of the migrating birds moving through the area, but it turns out that, while they do migrate, the Washington coast is a breeding ground for them. In fact, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website where I got this info, "the world's largest breeding colony is on a small, artificial island in the Columbia River between Oregon and Washington, home to more than 6,000 breeding pairs each year."

So, it's an exotic bird to me only in the sense of strikingly exciting, only because I hadn't seen one before.

The Cornell site (link above) describes their fishing technique:

To locate prey, they fly above water, between 10 and 100 feet high, and scan the water with bill pointed downward. When they spot prey they dive rapidly, usually submerging the body in the process but sometimes snatching the prey from the water without diving in. They usually consume fish in flight quickly after capture, unless the prey item is intended for the mate or chick.

That's exactly what this tern did, except it never flew as high as 100 feet. Most of the time is was about 20 feet high and only about 25 yards from the shore. It moved slowly along facing the wind, then cycled back around in an oval shape to start over.

To the Cornell description I would add that it hovers just before it dives or when it spots something. It's hovering in the following three photos.

This one shows the hover just before a dive.

I saw it dive and plunge into the water twice. I missed the first dive because I had still had the camera on single shot mode, and I was moving too fast for the autofocus. As it circled around again, I made adjustments, increasing the shutter speed and switching to continuous multishot mode. Then it dove again, not more than 20 yards away from where I perched on the bank.

I didn't photographed the drop, but focused on the spot where it would enter the water and started shooting when it entered the frame. It was moving so fast it was almost in the water before my finger got the button pushed.

I rendered the entire sequence of the dive and fly away as a GIF, so you can see the action. This is every (unedited) shot the camera captured, while I sat there depressing the shutter and holding my breath.

I don't think the tern caught anything. None of the photos show a fish.

Here are my favorite photos from the fly away, fully processed.

After the dive, the tern made maybe one more circle before winging away east, across the bay toward Dog Marsh.

But before we leave the tern, I have to share the very first shot I took of it … with another photobombing seagull!

The seagulls apparently really wanted their picture taken. So I obliged, composing a shot of them lined up on this piece (whole tree) of driftwood at Old Cannery Park.

That log of driftwood is a relatively new addition here; often I see the seagulls perched one apiece atop those dock pilings.

Willis Enterprises and Moon Island

After the Caspian tern, the rest of the afternoon felt like it would be anticlimactic (and it sort of was). But I kept going a bit longer, hoping for a few more species to round out the post.

I returned to the road and walked another half mile to the port terminal at Willis Enterprises, where they load wood chips onto barges. On the chain link fence around the port facility, this red-wing blackbird posed for exactly one shot.

Just past the port facility, at the edge of Moon Island (which was an island but got built up into a peninsula so they could build an airport), I went down to the water to photograph the cormorants hanging out on the channel marker and buoy.

The cormorants often have every level of the channel marker lined with nests, but at the moment only the second level (from the top) has a nest, which you can barely see even if you expand the photo.

I thought that the cormorants would make a nice ending to the post, but then when I was heading home, retracing my steps on the road between Willis Enterprises and Old Cannery Park, I paused to photograph this pair of mallard ducks. On my first pass through there I startled them away before I noticed them. This time I stayed well back to photograph them (and then practically tiptoed when I went past them.)

The male was standing guard and she wasn't moving, at least not the second time I went past them, so I wonder if she is sitting a nest there. It's awfully close to the road, but I guess it's possible. At any rate, I sure wasn't going to disturb them (again) in order to get close enough to see.

A Decent Birding Count

In the end I photographed nine species on the walk, and made one spectacular (for me) capture in the Caspian tern. Not the shorebird and migratory bird extravaganza I had hoped for when I set out, but I like the more commonplace birds too. So all in all I count it a pretty great day.

Thanks for viewing!