March 24th - Nothing to See Here

One picture for the day - gotta include it!

I reconnected with a Pacific County resident who I had met on a Washington Ornithological Society field trip that I had co-led a little over a decade ago. 

I gave him a few options: 

Involvement level 0: Just please don't shoot me when I'm parked in your driveway looking for birds.

Involvement level 1: Let's sit and look at birds for a bit and have a lovely chat with no mention in my blog. 

Involvement level 2: Let's sit and look at birds for a bit and I'll write all about it in my blog. 

He appreciated the options and decided that a 1.1 sounded about perfect. 

So, I woke up at Hunters Inn in Naselle, maybe not as early as I'd hoped, but lord I'd slept poorly while camping. My goal was to head up Big Hill Road. This road made me smile, just for the name. I lost a son, many a year ago. One of his favorite shows was Kipper - a cartoon with dogs and whatnot - all of them with British accents, and the places they visited often had these kinds of names. Big Lake was almost certainly a place in that cartoon. So Big Hill made me smile. 

I drove up that hill in search of Western Screech-Owls. I drove down that hill in hopes of chasing a Ruffed Grouse off of the road. The drizzle of 5:30 AM turned into the driving drizzle of 7:00 A.M., and it was a none-of-the-above morning. I was also (unsurprisingly) cut off miles short of the end of the road by signs noting that it was private, under surveillance... you know all of the signs that go up to let people know not to go somewhere that they know they shouldn't be. Not just "private property", but alllll of the reminders. So, I turned around short and headed back to the hotel. 

Packed up, I stopped in at the Naselle Coffee Company. I got the breakfast sandwich... an enormous slab of sausage, with cheese melted on it, slapped between two quickly dissolving halves of a croissant. Always been an English muffin guy for my breakfast sandwiches. They are better. Ready to die on that hill. 

From there, it was off to join Resident X for a lovely morning. It rained, but we had a sheltered spot to sit, watch, talk, listen. I got to hear a lot about the history of Naselle, from Radar Ridge to the Youth Camp at the base of the ridge. I got to hear about the history of yard sightings, from nesting swallows and ducks, to unfulfilled dipper hopes. We also talked about birding. We all do it in slightly different ways for slightly different reasons and try (at the best of times we DO try) to balance that with everything else in life. I'd say that he and I parted very much on the same page about a lot of things. 

And hey, this is a Big Enough Year attempt in Pacific County. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I heard and then got to see a Red-breasted Nuthatch, the 130th species I'd found in the county for the year. 

My only stop on the way out of the county was a lunch stop in South Bend at Chester's Oyster Bar. I grabbed a plate of fried oysters (I've had oysters on every trip to the county now!), and chatted with the locals. Biggest discovery - a new nickname for Great Blue Herons: "Shit-a-quarts". I... had never heard this nickname in my life, and was amazed when the bartender and the man sitting at the bar agreed automatically that this was the local name for Great Blue Herons!

I continued home in the rain, listening to reports of flooded roads all over the west side.