From the Contact Station March 2026

What Winter Brings for Us

Winter bonus foraging: If you were fortunate enough to come out after the really cold weather for the few days that we had beautiful sunshine at the beginning of February, you might have found an unusual treat. A walk around the contact station revealed ground that was wiggling. The Red-spotted (Common) Garter Snakes had come out to warm up in the sunshine. It seemed like everywhere you looked, there were snakes intertwined with each other and lifting their heads to take in the sun. One late sunny afternoon, I took a ride around the auto tour, and as I turned the corner before #6, where the

road goes over a small waterway and there are trees on both sides and canopy overhead, I found a Great Blue Heron standing in the middle of the road.  It’s not that they’re unusual on the road, but this seemed like a particularly odd spot for one. But then I noticed how attentive it was to the road edge and how it stretched itself out and slowly walked toward the edge. I thought to myself it’s after prey.  A Great Blue Heron in stealth mode is always something worth watching. As it approached the leafy green area, its head dipped down, and a sudden strike brought up a big snake. Unfortunately for the snakes, it was an equally exceptional day for the Great Blue Herons; a number of visitors reported they saw herons eating snakes that day. It was a bonus day for both birds and snakes, but only if you were in the right place at the right time or not in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Refuge Work Projects: As you know, the Refuge has been working on the new water system pump. A month ago, you could see a working crane in the hunt zone digging a well along Bachelor Slough to provide a new, deeper pump area for water from the Columbia River to feed our wetlands.  Where the old pumps are, much of the area has silted in need of a move to a better spot.  The next step in

the process is to lay 6000 feet of piping from the site of the new pump to feed into the system to the South. The hope is this part of the construction will be done by the end of March.  The photos show a ditch section near the hunt check station by the bridge going to Bachelor Island. The pipe has been laid out in anticipation of where the ditch will be and you can see there’s a lot that needs to be done yet. The areas will be refilled and smoothed over.  The fields are often used by

Columbian White-tailed Deer and wintering geese flocks for feeding. Once the piping is completed then it will be hooked up to the new pump and tested to make sure everything works well.  Hoping that the work completion, Mother Nature and Bonneville Dam will all play their parts to enable the Refuge to have adequate water ahead of the fall migration of waterfowl to properly fill our wetlands.

Is it a Golden or a Bald Eagle:   A frequent winter visitor comment is “I think I saw a Golden Eagle.” Well: the answer is usually not. Although they are not absent from the refuge Golden Eagles really are a rare sighting. Most often, it is probably a first year Bald Eagle. We have a lot of multiple aged Bald Eagles visiting now.  So, I’m going to reprint here some hints that I’ve done before to help you look at the right features on the birds to decide which one you might have.

• If the bird is flying, look at the silhouette. Bald Eagles are always proportionately short-tailed and large-headed, while Golden Eagles have long tails and small heads.
• In addition, the Golden Eagle has long outer secondaries that produce a noticeable round bulge, or shallow ‘S’ shape, on the trailing edge of the wing. For the Bald Eagle, the trailing edge of the wing is straighter giving it what is often referred to as a “washboard” look.
• Golden Eagle has a shallower wing beat than the Bald Eagle but that is hard to assess. However, if it pauses to soar the wings are held in a slight dihedral while a Bald Eagle keeps its wings flat.
• Looking at a perched bird: The bill protrudes quite a bit with Bald. It is strikingly prominent.
• A young Bald Eagle has a darker (blackish) bill and cere (where the nostrils are) than Golden Eagle, which has a yellow cere.
• The “block-head” appearance with the rear crown feathers somewhat erect is a characteristic of Bald Eagles.
• White scattered spotting is consistent with a first winter Bald, but not with any age Golden. Usually seen well on a flying or perched bird, it looks like someone flicked paint on the chest and underwings. It can be highly variable in young Bald Eagles.
• The Bald Eagle tarsi are bare; the intense yellow feet & tarsi are hard to miss. The legs would be feathered all the way to the foot in a Golden.
• And lastly, for a Golden, you would expect some gold feathers at the nape.

Lifer, lifer: As I have mentioned before, we do goose and raptor counts in the winter.  On Feb 20^th, it was time to do a goose count.  I was assigned North Bachelor Island.  Like the River S, it is surrounded by dikes and filled with fields and wetland ponds and streams.  It turned out to be a very slow day.  I saw a nice selection of Kestrel, Red-tailed Hawk and Bald Eagle.  There were several hundred American Robins to view.  There is a big lake on the Columbia River side of the island, and I climbed up the dike to check for geese.  I had five Western Canada Geese.  I counted them twice just to make sure.  That was my entire goose count for the day.

But I am never disappointed on days I do the goose count.  As I approached the lake, I saw a bigger than a bunny, smaller than a nutria-sized animal moving around in the field grass next to the track I was driving.  There was a lot of white and grayish hair, and I thought maybe the leucistic nutria was out there.  But it looked like a chubby fuzzy haired critter. It didn’t have that dark furred humpy look. And, oh my, that pointy pink nose and deep black eyes.  Wow, my first ever opossum. It took a while, but it finally came out onto the track where I could get a good look.  Admittedly, I have seen opossum before, but that was on the side of roads in New Jersey and they were all squashed, sadly.  This was my first animated adult, busy gathering food marsupial.

Marsupials are mammals with a pouch in which they carry young.  Opossums are the only marsupials in North America.  Except for higher elevations, opossums now occupy most human-occupied habitats in western Washington. Prior to expansive European settlement, the opossum was found only in Central America and the southeastern United States. Virginia Opossums first arrived in Washington in the early 1900s as pets and novelties. They, like nutria, escaped!

Opossums are nocturnal, spending the day in dens. However, they can be seen at any time of day in winter when food is scarce. Except for breeding or a female with young, they are solitary animals. In urban areas, opossums are beneficial as rodent and carrion eaters. However, they do prey upon native invertebrates, small mammals, amphibians, reptiles, ground-nesting birds, nestlings, and eggs.

I do have another story about opossums. So, I guess it is not truly a lifer for me. Before moving back west after retirement, I briefly volunteered at a wildlife rehab center.  There was a woman there who routinely checked opossum road kills to see if a female had a pouch of live babies.  (Big icky factor there.)  She would occasionally rescue a pouch full.  One day she asked me to cup my hands, and she transferred a dozen just rescued babies to me.  I sat there with my hands in a tight ball feeling the babies in constant motion seemingly seeking comfort and warmth with their siblings. I will never forget the wonder of it.  For a short time, I was their foster mama pouch.

Biologist Alex said they are seen occasionally walking out in the fields searching for food.  What a fun surprise.  I love this Refuge.

-Susan Setterberg, Ridgefield NWR Contact Station Volunteer
Images by Susan Setterberg