Category: Blogging

Mea Culpa

I know it’s been too long since I posted here, but there are several reasons for that lack of publishing. Most importantly, I’m getting older, and it suddenly seems much harder to get things done.

It doesn’t help that our house is apparently aging as well, resulting in me having to spend an unusual amount of time working on home projects. First, our relatively new Kohler shower started dripping steadily and needed to be fixed. I really like the faucet setup, but it’s new enough that I had no idea how to repair it and ended up spending time on YouTube figuring out what parts to order for my model. It turned out to be relatively simple, much easier than I had anticipated.

That problem was barely solved when our Craftsman garage door opener decided it had had enough. I wasn’t about to tackle that on my own, so Leslie talked to someone who had worked around the house before. He said he had installed four of his own, and said he worked on it if I would help him since it was a two-man project. We worked on it most of the day, and still didn’t finish it, but it works well enough we can charge our electric vehicle.

Once I’d finished those jobs, I set out to ensure that our drip-irrigation system had survived the winter. It had, but as usual, parts of the system had to be repaired. What was unusual was that the part of the system that runs under the patio wasn’t working, and that was a bitch to fix, mainly because the screws that hold the deck down would come loose. Several were stripped, and others just plain wouldn’t move. Eventually, I discovered that the mice had chewed holes in the lines, and I replaced one of the lines. I never could find the other line and finally had to route it over the top of the deck.

The hardest job, though, was digging out a flower bed in the front yard and replacing the soil with sand and rocks, really heavy rocks, too heavy for an 84-year-old who is still recovering from Rheumatoid Arthritis.

The actual time spent on these projects wouldn’t have kept me from posting more often than I usually do, but by the time I had finished them I wasn’t up to spending hours at the computer working on polishing photos and trying to write something that made sense of them.

Luckily, part of the problem is that I think I got the best shots of American Avocets that I have ever gotten before. After hours of editing, eliminating the obvious, and not-so-obvious mechanical errors, I still have 38 shots that I need to narrow down to 12 or so pictures. They’re good enough that I didn’t want to just paste them randomly on my blog.

A Sunny Day at Fort Flagler

A week of sunshine and temperatures in the low 50’s almost convinced me that Spring was near, especially since it got me out birding again, but none of the birds we saw at Ft. Flagler were in breeding plumage yet.

In fact, most of them were definitely still in non-breeding plumage, like this Black-bellied Plover

A shorebird walking along the sandy beach near the ocean waves.

which definitely lacked the black belly that the species is named after.

There were a few, though, that seemed to be gradually transitioning to breeding plumage

A shorebird standing on a rocky beach, surrounded by various colored pebbles, with water in the background.

though they still weren’t recognizable as Black-bellied Plovers.

Most of the Sanderlings were still in non-breeding plumage, too.

A small bird foraging among wet rocks and pebbles by the water's edge.

None displayed the Rufus color I associate with Sanderling in breeding colors, but a few of them were definitely darker than the ones in winter plumage.

Two shorebirds searching for food among rocky shorelines and shallow water.

It turned out that the birds had a much better sense of what season it is after we ended up with a late snow day about a week after these pictures were taken.

I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday for Spring to arrive. Hopefully Mother Nature will remember to glance at her calendar.

Birdwatching in the Pacific Northwest: A Sunny Day Adventure

It’s been a long, wet Winter here in the Pacific Northwest, and it doesn’t look like the rain is ready to leave quite yet.  As you may have noticed, that’s meant a lack of bird pictures. Hopefully, that’s about to change, though, as we’ve had a couple of sunny days, allowing us to bird Belfair, and, more recently, the Port Townsend area.

Just because it’s sunny here in Tacoma doesn’t mean that it is necessarily going to be sunny where the birds are, though, as we found at our visit to Theler where we were greeted by fog

A misty walking path surrounded by trees, creating a serene and tranquil atmosphere.


 and a general lack of birds.  Most of the birds we did see seemed more interested in finding food than in posing for pictures,

A bird perched upside down on a branch, reaching for small berries.


at least until we encountered this Pheasant

A pheasant standing in dry grass, with droplets of water on the grass and a blurred background.

Along the trail. I assume he was probably raised locally since pheasants are uncommon here in Western Washington, and he seemed largely indifferent to the cameras pointed at his face.

My favorite picture from our morning walk at Belfair was this shot of a Spotted Towhee swallowing a berry.

A close-up of a bird with dark feathers and an orange belly, perched on a branch, holding a berry in its beak.

It didn’t hurt that the sun had finally burned most of the fog off.

At other times, I might have been disappointed by how few birds we saw, but it felt great to walk four miles without getting rained on.