Go East to Go West: The Wallowas, Part 1

In the two years we've spent traveling around Oregon, there remained one big corner of the map left unexplored: the northeastern portion of the state, along our shared border with Idaho. This area is justifiably famous for its beautiful mountains, and Travel Oregon considers the Wallowas one of our "7 Wonders". The funny thing about Oregon is that the farther east you travel, the more it feels like "the West", and, in fact, several Westerns were filmed out that way, including Paint Your Wagon. But this wasn't a movie tour trip (that will have to wait until Astoria, e.g. The Goonies, Point Break, Kindergarten Cop). There were lots of birds on our list, starting with a quick stop in La Grande for Great Gray Owls.

The owls are known to nest every year in the Wallowa-Whiteman National Forest in the Spring Creek area. Spoiler alert: we didn't find any, but there were plenty of beautiful wildflowers to entertain us, along with Variable Checkerspots to pollinate them. After promising ourselves we'd be back for the Great Grays next year, we explored the larger La Grande area where we picked up awesome year birds like Western Kingbirds, and nesting Bank Swallows.

Variable Checkerspot

The lush meadows of Wallowa-Whitman NF, chock-full of wildflowers

Large-flowered triteleia (Howell's triteleia) Triteleia grandiflora

Western Kingbird

Bank Swallow colony

The Wallowas are a legit mountain range; probably the first I've seen in America. The Cascades have some great standalone behemoths, like Mt. Hood, Mt. Ranier, Mount St. Helens, and others, but to see several peaks contiguous with one another, all pushed together shoulder-to-shoulder, was a new experience altogether. Definitely deserving of the "Wonder" moniker. We set up camp at our home for the next few days, at Wallowa Lake SP.

Behold: the Wallowas!

We woke up a tad before 5:00 a.m. to the irregular drumming of a sapsucker against a nearby utility pole. This would be a lifer if only we could stir ourselves out of the tent quickly enough to confirm that it was, as we suspected, one of the Red-napeds that breed in the park grounds. We weren't quick enough this time around, but he would return shortly to repeat the circuit around his territory. His drumming post of choice was a wooden utility pole, and the sapsucker went straight for a big crack where he'd get the best reverberation. 

Red-naped Sapsucker

Our first destination for the day was the town of Enterprise, where we picked up some good birds at the local Wildlife Management Area. According the eBird, our best find was a flyover Great Egret - strangely, the first time it ever occurred to me that they're range doesn't extend everywhere. Better birds, in my own opinion, were the two fledgling magpies sitting just off the ground. There were also a good number of Bank Swallows nesting near the water, and California Quail overrunning the yard across the street, where they perched on and walked all over the mailbox, light fixtures, fences, etc. They were in total command.

Fledgling Black-billed Magpie

Bank Swallow

Cedar Waxwing

California Quail

We stopped at McCully Creek, which is reportedly one of the best places around for Spruce Grouse. It was already past noon by the time we started, and was mostly quiet as a result, except for the quick-three-beers of some Olive-sided Flycatchers that we could hear well, but weren't able to track down.

Warbling Vireo

Pacific Forktail

We did, however, hit the jackpot for butterflies, especially a group of hairstreaks with which we were previously unacquainted: the elfins. We quickly picked up Hoary, Brown, and Western Pine Elfins, along with Green Comma, Juba Skipper, and a flyby Stella Orangetip. We've still never seen an orangetip, any orangetip, sit still for even a moment.

Hoary Elfin

Western Pine Elfin

Brown Elfin

Green Comma

Juba Skipper

Back at Wallowa Lake SP, the river that cuts through the park was chock full of American Dippers and Spotted Sandpipers. Maureen and I are so popular with these birds, that they literally lined up for us to see them! One sandpiper was so excited it couldn't figure out whether it wanted to preen or wiggle its butt.

Spotted Sandpiper (front) and American Dipper

Prowling for Owls at Klamath Marsh NWR

In February we headed south to Klamath Falls for our second annual trip to the Winter Wings Festival. We were looking forward to revisiting all the hotspots that had treated us so well on our last visit, but the main reason we wanted to get back was the overnight owl prowl we booked in hopes of finding a Great Gray Owl.

Black-crowned Night-Heron

Night-heron roost. There were dozens in just these couple of trees, and none anywhere else in town.

We met up with guides Harry and Kevin in the afternoon, along with our celebrity tagalong, James Currie. Currie was in town as the festival's keynote, but he was also filming an episode of his show Birding Adventures TV, with his trusty cameraman Jeff trying to capture footage of his "golden bird" (new episodes air on Destination America, but older episodes are available here).

James Currie

We would spend the night in a bungalow at the Klamath Marsh NWR headquarters. This was the same day the armed occupation of Malheur NWR finally ended, and we want to give credit here to USFWS who were prepared for the worst, not least because the refuge lies along one of the main routes to Burns, OR. By all accounts, the field trip was touch-and-go for a while, and you can bet that we would have been devastated had our plans been scuppered by a bunch of militant scumbags.

Our target: Great Gray Owl. This one was mounted in the building where we bunked for the night.

Spotted Owl wouldn't be a bad bird, either.

On our drive in to the refuge we had a steady stream of Rough-legged Hawks fly alongside the road, and perched in nearby trees. Later that night, this same road was where we'd flush half-a-dozen or more Short-eared Owls who were laying in wait for any voles foolish enough to leave snow tunnels.

Rough-legged Hawk

We haven't got any photos to share from our nocturnal prowlings, but the night started with a single toot from a Northern Pygmy-owl. A heard-only Northern Saw-whet Owl called much more persistently, but too far off to consider tracking down. And our target bird? Great Gray Owls make a repeating "woo, woo, woo" call… of which we heard only one "woo". A single woo, in fact, followed immediately by a Great Horned Owl. It all happened so fast, that we decided not to count it. When we finally do see/hear a Great Gray Owl, I want to FEEL that I was in the presence of greatness.

We were up well before dawn broke the next morning, hoping to turn up any last-minute owls while they were still active. A calling Pygmy-owl lured us into a meadow, leading to an exhausting quarter mile hike through foot-and-a-half-deep snow. We weren't able to pinpoint it, and settled for decent looks at a Clark's Nutcracker.

We didn't see any owls, but the sunrise alone was worth waking up for

On the way back into Klamath, we stopped at Collier State Park. We were all quite taken with an active pair of American Dippers that we'd missed when we checked in briefly the day before. They seemed right at home under the bridge, and someone said they saw a nest, but I don't think they ever visited it while we were there.

Williamson River runs through Collier State Park. That's the same Williamson as in Williamson's Sapsucker

Not sure what type of moth this is, but they were everywhere

American Dipper

Of course our attention broke away from the Dippers as soon as Harry called out a Northern Pygmy-owl he watched fly in across the stream. We'd already heard a couple call on this trip, but this was the first we'd seen. We were all impressed with how cooperative it was, unobstructed and out in the sunlight -- of course that was nothing compared with the one Maureen and I would find in Ashland three days later.

Northern Pygmy-owl - perhaps look for this future celebrity on a future episode of Birding Adventures?

Chasing Waterfalls for American Dippers

One of the reasons we moved out West was to see different birds. Granted, some of these are just Western analogs of birds that we found regularly in Georgia or Florida: Black Oystercatcher, instead of American Oystercatcher; or Western Wood-pewee, instead of Eastern Wood-pewee. But the ones we get most excited about are the birds that are make their living in ways that are very different to the what we’re used to (birds that nest in deserts and along rocky shorelines come to mind). And more than any other bird, the one I just wouldn’t shut up about from the moment we arrived in Oregon was our only aquatic songbird: the American Dipper.

Dippers nest behind or near waterfalls, using the spray to keep their mossy nests moist and verdant. Silver Falls State Park seemed like our best bet nearby for finding the our target bird, and so, cavalierly defying TLC’s sage and timeless advice, we went chasing American Dippers. The park itself is a temperate rainforest in the foothills of the Cascades (how do we only live half an hour from rainforest?!). It’s best known for it’s “Trail of Ten Falls”, a 9-mile loop that takes you past all manner of waterfall, ranging between from between 27 ft. and 178 ft. We managed to knock four miles off our hike by cutting out two of the falls, but five miles is plenty far to lug a spotting scope, let me tell you.

The caves here were formed after the organic matter underneath ancient lava flows eroded, leaving only basalt

Close-up of the basalt

Lichen-covered rocks

Our first good bird of the day was from an observation lookout on the road in: two Common Ravens circled us overhead, close side by side one another. Other than a fleeting glimpse of a raven on our drive up Oregon two months ago, these were our first, and our first opportunity to really study and enjoy them. I’ll admit that I may have jumped the gun once or twice before this, when I let myself believe that a distant crow might — just might — have been a raven. Now we could clearly make out their wedge-shaped tails, and hear the reverberation of their hollow, throaty croaks. Not to mention that we could finally fully appreciate just how huge they really are.

Common Ravens

Once we got inside the park grounds, we were delighted to see a handsome Violet-green Swallow resting atop the bathroom roof. Of all the swallows species out here, this one seems to be the one we see perched the least often. Then again, maybe that’s only been our perception because it’s a new swallow for us, and we’ve been anxious to get a good look at it. In any case, this was our chance, and we happily seized it.

Violet-green Swallow

After we finally started along the Trail of Ten Falls, we heard Pacific Wrens singing everywhere. The entire day they gave the American Robins stiff competition for most numerous bird, but they rarely popped up for us to see them well. A strong contingent of Wilson’s Warblers was out, too, and mostly concentrated around a single bridge, flying circles all around us while somehow managing to keep their little toupee’s securely fastened.

Wilson's Warbler

Steller's Jay

Non-birds included an adorable Townsend’s Chipmunk. In New York there’s only one species (Eastern Chipmunk), and so growing up I always just thought chipmunks were chipmunks, but in the West there is a huge diversity of species, and in all of North America there are as many as two dozen altogether.

Townsend's Chipmunk

Another group we’re becoming more familiar with are crane flies. Most crane flies look like gigantic mosquitos. I mean HUGE, prehistoric-looking mosquitos. But they’re not mosquitos, and they’re actually quite harmless. This Tiger Crane Fly doesn’t look much like a mosquito at all, but rather more like a robber fly. Notable Leps. we saw on our hike were a worn Echo Azure, and a neat black and white Rheumaptera moth.

Tiger Crane Fly

Echo Azure

Rheumaptera sp.

Salmonberries! There were quite a lot of these along the trails (and they're delicious)

When we eventually did see an American Dipper, we were lucky enough to find two together. One of them was feeding the other, and we’d naturally assumed in the moment that we were watching an adult and a juvenile, but now I’m not so sure: as part of Dippers’ courtship, “the male may feed the female after she begs from a crouched position with quivering wings, following which the male often sings with neck and bill stretched upward” (Knight, 2001, p. 447). I think this is what we witnessed (it was in late May) — it doesn’t look to me like a juvenile, but it’s hard to say with certainty. This is supposed to be followed by a flight chase, but unfortunately a group of rowdy teenagers (does that make me sound old?) went down into the stream to splash around, and scared the Dippers off.

American Dippers

But the Dippers didn’t disappoint my crazy high expectations for them to dazzle and amaze; we were even able to make out those bright white feathered eyelids of theirs from our spot high above them. We encountered a couple more Dippers farther along, but only in flight, and we didn’t manage looks that were nearly as satisfying. By the end of the day the narrow 5-mile trail we were on started to feel like the line for Splash Mountain, with so many thousands of people coming to see the waterfalls. Somebody forgot to tell them that there’s something that makes waterfalls even more spectacular, and that’s American Dippers.

White, feathered eyelids!

I have the wingspan of a Turkey Vulture...

... and Maureen's is the same as a Great Blue Heron

Reference:

The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior. Illustrated by David Allen Sibley. Edited by Chris Elphick, John B. Dunning, and D. A. Sibley. 2001 by Chanticleer Press. Essay written by Thomas Knight.