tiggymalvern (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tiggymalvern) wrote2009-12-14 08:58 pm
tiggymalvern) wrote2009-12-14 08:58 pm
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I am free!
Saturday was my last day of work as an employee, yay! I am now purely an independent contractor, and I can work when I please :-)
So naturally, I drove over to Cle Elum on Sunday for the Christmas Bird Count today. I find when getting up at 4.30am, staying the night before is preferable. It started to snow not long after I started the drive, and I arrived in town with a bare dusting of snow over the pavements (two years ago in the same week, there were four foot snowbanks lining the road from the ploughing). It turned into a windless evening with huge snowflakes falling fast, and it was just gorgeous. Today we got to look for birds, tramping through 4-5 inches of pristine, perfect powder snow. It was a little windy and still snowing until around 9.30, but after that it was still and dry and crisp with gorgeous, untouched snow, and it was a fabulous day to be out. I cannot recommend enough a stroll in the winter canyons with raptors soaring everywhere :-) Bird of the day was our delightfully posed golden eagle, with all his glowing feathers sticking out from the back of his head.
Of course, all that stunning, fluffy white stuff lost some of its appeal when I had to drive back over the pass this evening, sharing the road with a number of complete dickwits. But still worth it!
So naturally, I drove over to Cle Elum on Sunday for the Christmas Bird Count today. I find when getting up at 4.30am, staying the night before is preferable. It started to snow not long after I started the drive, and I arrived in town with a bare dusting of snow over the pavements (two years ago in the same week, there were four foot snowbanks lining the road from the ploughing). It turned into a windless evening with huge snowflakes falling fast, and it was just gorgeous. Today we got to look for birds, tramping through 4-5 inches of pristine, perfect powder snow. It was a little windy and still snowing until around 9.30, but after that it was still and dry and crisp with gorgeous, untouched snow, and it was a fabulous day to be out. I cannot recommend enough a stroll in the winter canyons with raptors soaring everywhere :-) Bird of the day was our delightfully posed golden eagle, with all his glowing feathers sticking out from the back of his head.
Of course, all that stunning, fluffy white stuff lost some of its appeal when I had to drive back over the pass this evening, sharing the road with a number of complete dickwits. But still worth it!
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The strolling in cold, pristine snow covered mountains sounds appealing. Just not at 4:30 in the morning. ^^
We get to see a picture of this posed eagle sometime, yes? Since you've been posting about bird watching I've started taking notice, too. Mama-san and watched as a young, not quite adult red-tailed hawk got bullied by a quickly growing crowd of good sized black birds (dunno if they were large crows or ravens). Or so we thought at first, they were too far to see many details. From what Mama-san told me and what I could see, the hawk must've dived to catch something tasty. The "bullying" we thought was going on was the black birds trying to take away the prey. Of course the hawk wasn't going to give it up and it was too big to fly with :)
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There will be no eagle pictures, sorry. Unlike bald eagles, which will sit low in a tree by the roadside and glare balefully at you, golden eagles are always halfway up the mountain on the other side of the valley. It takes a scope to get a good look, and the cameras just don't make it!
I didn't even take pictures of all the beautiful canyons and ridges and valleys, because if you're framing pictures, you're not looking hard enough for birds to count XD
Crow family birds will hassle raptors for no good reason at all, just because they don't like them, though they will hassle them more when they might drop food. There was a young bald eagle yesterday being harrassed by half a dozen ravens, while it was just cruising the skies above the valley.
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Winter stroll sounds like it was fun! Me these days, I usually get the 'omg the driving' reactions first when it starts to snow, which is a bit of a shame. It is kind of pretty when there's a nice fresh coat...
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It was especially nice in the snow, because we had access to a private ranch for the bird count, so it was just us and the snow for part of the day (not that too many people were out hiking in other areas either!)
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