Adventure in Dog Marsh

I went searching for clouds.

I was working on a short Liketu post (Clouds on the Bay), which would be a selection of 10 cloud photos taken along the Grays Harbor bay in Hoquiam, Wash. Most of the photos would be from my archives, but I thought I might round out the post with a more recent photo, so on a sunny late afternoon, I headed out to Dog Marsh.

Dog Marsh (aka IDD-1) is a 45-acre Port of Grays Harbor property on the southern outskirts of Hoquiam. The site is bound on three sides by water: the Hoquiam River to the east, the bay on the south, and a small tidal inlet on the west. To the north, a strip of woods and the last of the Puget Sound and Pacific Railroad separate the site from the town.

Along the water sides, jumbled boulders form a riprap, at the top edge of which runs a gravel path.

Portions of the land inside the gravel path have been officially designated wetlands. Dog Marsh is not really a marsh; the nickname originates in a column by regional writer Kristine Lowder, which I discovered when I first started writing about and photographing the area in 2018. In our mild, rainy winters, the wetlands collect water and often the grass is taller than what you'll see in these photos. On a gray, misty morning, it really looks marshy. That and the fact that everyone walks their dogs there make "Dog Marsh" the perfect moniker.

No one else in Hoquiam calls it that.

After photographing the train and the clouds that afternoon, I was drawn away from the water, which rarely happens on my photowalks out there. The pooling water on the land had attracted large flocks of birds. There were cackling geese, Canada geese, and some tiny shorebirds. But what really caught my eye was a small flock of a kind I had never seen before.

These are greater white-fronted geese, ID'ed by the white feathers on the face above the bill.

You can see the white face best in the middle photo above, if you expand it. I sat in the grass with my back against the embankment, so I wouldn't stand out on the horizon and scare them. Even with my 75-300mm zoom lens I couldn't quite get a closeup shot.

As I was shooting the geese, I kept getting distracted by a group walking their dogs along the path. The low winter sun was providing some great backlighting, creating silhouettes on the horizon.

The dogs were soon stirring the flocks.

Mostly I didn't photograph the disruption. For one thing, the zoom lens didn't lend itself to capturing a wide angle shot of the flocks in flight. I was also looking for 'natural' photos, not photos of human companions scaring the wildlife. I did capture a bit of the action, though, when the dogs were running the little shorebirds.

The group (and the dogs!) were getting closer to me. The people didn't seem too enthused about me photographing them, and I thought the dogs would soon start running the greater white-fronted geese, so I composed one more shot and moved on.

I packed the camera away, thinking I would call it a day. Too many people, too much commotion: the marsh is best in the early morning hours when I (sometimes) have the place to myself. To avoid the people I had just photographed (not being sure how they would react to being photographed) I wandered along the the train tracks, with the strip of woods between me and the marsh, heading for home.

By the time I reached the opposite side of the marsh I realized that the clouds on the horizon were probably going to make a nice sunset. I decided it was worth staying and cut through the woods, heading for the westernmost point of the gravel path along the bay.

Oy vey! The people I had photographed had reversed course, walking parallel to me along the waterside of the marsh. I was still going to run into them. And now it was getting awkward: were they trying to run into me, to confront me over taking their picture? I headed back the way I had come, this time walking on the slick, muddy ground in front of the woods.

I chased a medium-sized bird ahead of me in the grass as I walked, before finally scaring it up into a tree.

I think this is a northern flicker, a type of woodpecker, based on the red stripe on its head, the bill, and its behavior. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website All About Birds (link above):

On walks, don’t be surprised if you scare one up from the ground. It’s not where you’d expect to find a woodpecker, but flickers eat mainly ants and beetles, digging for them with their unusual, slightly curved bill.

The flicker gave me a chance to practice using manual focus with my zoom lens, since the autofocus insisted on picking up the tree branches instead of the bird.

Meanwhile, the dogs in the marsh had finally convinced the large flock of cackling geese to head across the bay. I took a few shots of the smaller flock of Canada geese as they followed. You can see the cackling geese far away in the sky in the first photo of this series, if you expand it.

When I reached the river, a cormorant was riding a piece of driftwood out to the bay. Walking down the bank to get in position for a photo scared it farther out.

I was keen to photograph a behavior I frequently see in cormorants: they will stand on a piece of driftwood (or something else that holds them out of the water), perfectly motionless, their wings outstretched, looking to me like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I didn't know what they were doing, but I wanted to document it and then look it up.

The best shot I got is oddly composed. I was balancing the camera on my knee with one hand, the zoom lens fully extended, and using the other hand to focus by selecting the cormorant in the flip out touchscreen. Awkward, to say the least.

The double-crested cormorant page on All About Birds explains what they're doing:

Cormorants often stand in the sun with their wings spread out to dry. They have less preen oil than other birds, so their feathers can get soaked rather than shedding water like a duck’s. Though this seems like a problem for a bird that spends its life in water, wet feathers probably make it easier for cormorants to hunt underwater with agility and speed.

I snapped over 50 photos to get these handful of useable ones.

After photographing the cormorant, I took one more silhouette shot. Thankfully, this guy didn't notice I was taking his photo.

The group I had been avoiding had left, so I headed out to the western point of Dog Marsh to catch the sunset. I took the photo of the tug and barge that opens this post on the way, still using the zoom lens. Then I switched to the 18-55mm to capture the sunset.

My camera battery died immediately after taking exactly one photo of the sunset.

In the end, I didn't use any of the cloud photos I had gone in search of for the Clouds on the Bay post.

But I had a nice little adventure and ended up with a full Photography Lovers post.