Author: Dan Cordell

Gallery

A foggy morning at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

This morning a friend joined me on the hour-long drive down to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, a brackish wetlands habitat on the southern end of Puget Sound, just a few minutes north of Olympia on I-5. This federally-maintained wetlands is a major nesting site for birds of all kinds as well as a migration stop-off. Seeing as we’ve had a rather early-onset spring here on the West Coast, early March is seeing quite a few early arrivals. First-of-the-year rufous hummingbirds been being reported around northwest Washington for the past week and I saw one this morning at Nisqually (see later in this post for the photo proof!). We were joined not long after we started by a wonderful retired high-school teacher (44 years of teaching!) who we spent the entire hike conversing with.

The variety of birds we saw was impressive, and my pictures only reflect a small portion of them. It was also a very foggy morning: we arrived at just before 7:30am and didn’t start seeing direct sunshine until around 9:15! The fog unfortunately meant that photos were difficult. The fog was so thick that anything beyond about 10 meters was shrouded in fog, with the colors and sharpness of any picture muted toward gray and blurry.

Still, I managed to get some pictures I liked, and saw some really cool birds along the way.

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Gallery

Spring arrives in February this year

It may not be spring by the calendar, but the plants and birds sure think it is. We’ve gotten a very early spring here on the west coast and all the local birds are busy with mating displays and nest building. The normally easy-to-shoot Anna’s hummingbirds are non-stop bundles of energy right now, chasing each other around in mating displays. The only shot I got of one this morning was of a resting male with a bad lighting angle:

Anna's hummingbird (male)

Anna’s hummingbird (male)


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Aside

I talk to strangers

Today was a unexpectedly nice day in Seattle. Rather than the deluge of rain predicted, it was party sunny skies all morning.

So, of course, I went out and took pictures. I won’t repost most of them here, but I had two nice conversations with different people today, both of whom pointed me toward things I might not have otherwise noticed.

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BVI Sailing 2015: The Route and Schedule

Several times over the past several weeks my friend Tim and I have met up to plan the schedule and route for our British Virgin Islands sailing trip this coming May, with additional input (and experience) from Charles. The trick has been striking a fine enough balance between seeing as much as we can and keeping it as a vacation, with plenty of time to relax and lots of different activities available for us and our crews.

Sure, we could just arrive there with a rough idea of where we’re going to go and wing it: in fact, in some areas that may be just fine (it’s what we did on my May 2014 sailing trip in the Sea of Cortez out of La Paz, Mexico: we had a direction picked out and where we ended up was a combination of what we decided in the morning and how the winds were that day), but in the British Virgin Islands in May, there are going to be a lot of other charter boats as well as cruisers, and we’ll be competing each afternoon with all of them for mooring balls or anchorages. It also means we don’t have to make a decision each morning, instead we can pick from what we’ve already planned as the primary and alternate sites for that day.

Today we finalized it, for as final as these things can be: You’ll notice that we have alternate anchorages/mooring sites for each day. It’s a good idea to have a flexible schedule due to variances in weather and even traffic from other boats. So, without further ado, here’s what we’ve got planned.

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