This past week we began monitoring our roughly 70 nest boxes in the Yachats River Valley and Waldport. Here, Gail is holding the world's tiniest birdhouse on a stick. About 50 of the nest boxes are on private property making our participation in SWIFTY a good way to keep in touch with our neighbors. It seems the love of birds cuts through all walks of life.
Last Saturday was the Wild Things festival in Yachats. Jim Welch, our SWIFTY founder, came up with the idea last year for a kid friendly celebration of all the wild creatures on our stretch of the Oregon Coast. A number of environmental organizations participated with demonstrations, native plant sales, whale and bird watching, and education. Gail and I tended our spotting scope out at the observation platform overlooking the ocean at the mouth of the Yachats River, along with a tide pool naturalist, state park whale representative, and Lincoln County Audubon members with a scope and bird expertise. Unfortunately, we were limited by thick fog covering the water. I also displayed a video of local trail camera clips I made back at The Commons.
Below are some snapshots I took, not well composed, but a taste of the action.
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Below are some random bird photos from the past few weeks, plus a non-bird surprise.
Last week, on May 7, long time friends Joe and Diana from Napa stopped to visit us. They were returning from Seattle where their daughter Erin lives with her family. We spent the afternoon visiting at the house, driving up to the Cape Perpetua lookout, and later having dinner at The Drift Inn. It was a very pleasant visit catching up with them. Erin and Andria were born about the same time and have been best friends all these years.
Joe and Diana
Diana was the school psychologist where I taught, and Joe worked with me as a teacher in the Adolescent Program at Napa State Hospital back in the early 80's. Joe is a poet and wrote a poem about Yachats the day after our visit.
Our friend and SWIFTY founder, Jim Welch, has organized a Wild Things Festival for Yachats. He has pulled in the new Chamber of Commerce director who did much of the planning also. The festival will have a family friendly focus and bring in environmentalists, artists, and entertainers for a full day of wild things education and fun. Gail and I have been volunteering the past 3 Sundays to work on giant puppets under the direction of artist Michael Guerriero.
As luck would have it, the camera inside April's nest box quit working a few days before the eggs were due to hatch. There was not much I could do as I certainly didn't want to open her box to fiddle with the camera. It appears that her eggs hatched on May 5, as she was still sitting on the nest and there were bits of egg shell around her. I made a quick check with my endoscope. Her ducklings must have been under her. The next day, April and ducklings were gone. I have a trail cam aimed at the river in hopes that she will come by with her ducklings.
Endoscope view on May 6. Egg shell pieces were mixed into her pine shavings. I didn't see any evidence of predation or anything that went wrong. We sure would have loved to see the ducklings pop out of the box and run for the water.
On April 12, we dropped off Daisy for an overnight stay with our trusted dog care lady and went to Salem. We stayed with our friends Bob and Mary, returning home the next evening. We had fun touring the Bush's Pasture Park where Mary is a volunteer tending the flower gardens. We saw a play that evening put on by students at Willamette University. The next day, we drove out of town a bit to walk around a new nature preserve where we saw various raptors and waterfowl.
