From the Contact Station January 2021

Happy Holidays and Happy Winter

Best news ever, and you have probably now seen it elsewhere in this e-news edition, but it is worth repeating. The bathrooms have been reopened!  No more having to worry about dehydrating before starting a run around the River S.  I am fortunate to live five minutes from the gate so bathroom breaks were easy for me, but my friends coming from Oregon would always make Rosauers a first and last stop for facilities with coffee, etc. Well, there are some benefits there.

Winter is probably my favorite time on the refuge.  Everything opens for great views.  Winter has its own beauty in the starkness beneath clouds of silver through shades of gray to charcoal.  Lots of soaking wet raptors in the trees.  I had nine Red-tailed Hawks on a recent drive around, all perched.  With a sunbreak you might see them fanning their tails or opening their wings slightly to dry a bit.  Not quite the look of a Double-crested Cormorant, but you get the idea.

On my last duck count I was assigned the River S unit.  It was slow to begin, but there were a lot of geese in the Rest Lake/Swartz Lake area.  I was able to find several Dusky Geese.  I love these geese.  They are slightly smaller than the big Western subspecies of Canada Geese (the ones which stay around to nest in the summer) but they are like chocolate geese, a beautiful brown all over.  And, they are our reason for being.  The refuge was established to provide wintering grounds for this endangered subspecies of Canada Goose.  Check out the large geese in these lakes (both sides of the road from just past post #12 to post #13).  The darker Dusky will pop out among the paler Westerns. You might catch a sighting of a collared Dusky among them.  I’ve had up to 15 Dusky in this group in two counts this year.  I have to say the two with collars I spotted on my last survey were rather cheeky in their behavior.  I could see the collar but they were into their morning nap with necks curled over their backs and only facing their butts toward me. I is very hard to read their collar numbers when they do that.  I went away defeated by one of them.

I do love the eagles, and there are a number turning up now.  However, when they decide to fly over my half-counted flock of Cackling Geese, I am not real pleased.  I had an adult eagle make multiple appearances on my last count which made it hard to get a good number.  Geese and ducks were scattering everywhere.  Without fail, the geese know the eagle is coming before I do.  Ah, the challenges of bird surveys.

I know that some people don’t like to be on the refuge during hunt times.  But if you are a waterfowl fan, let me encourage you to do a round on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday during hunt season.  The hunt blinds in the hunt zone are set up to allow shooting only in directions that do not point to the auto tour.  The shot that is used is not high velocity so does not go very far.  I watched a Labrador retriever working from a blind to the right of the road as you drive toward the hunt gate. It was amazing to watch  the dog work. What I have noticed about hunt days is there are a lot more geese, ducks and swans in the lakes on the auto tour.  On non-hunt days, they scatter more to the ponds on the hunt zone.  Keep an eye out for Greater White-fronted Goose and a possible Snow Goose in the mix.  They are frequently seen in Vancouver Lake Bottoms and Sauvie Island and occasionally wander over to River S.  These species seem to prefer the food sources in the bottoms and on Sauvie.

If you want a real challenge for birding, now is the time to check out all our visiting gulls.  Most common would be the Herring, Ring-billed and Glaucous-winged Gulls, but there

might be a California Gull and a rare sighting of Mew or Iceland (Thayer’s) Gull.  But most of all, there are probably some hybrids out there just to make everything more interesting.  Glaucous-winged Gulls do hybridize with Western and Herring Gull producing offspring that are a little bit of both and difficult to pin down.  Their unofficial name is Olympic Gulls.

As we move into January, I am hoping for some precipitation that will turn the refuge white with frost or snow and ice up the ponds to reflect winter’s beauty.  Looking forward to winter.

-Susan Setterberg, Contact Station Volunteer
Photos by Susan Setterberg