Partly because it was a good bird and partly to get away from the winter, I decided to make a 12 day, 9 airport run for all the rarities across the US.  I left on January 14th, arriving in Portland, Oregon that night.

Enterprise had my car ready and I drove to Lincoln City, checked into my hotel and I was out like a light.

I was up early, my GPS got me to the Nestucca NWR in 20 minutes.  As soon as I turned in NWR road,  I saw the Tundra Bean Goose almost instantly.  It was with a group of Dusky Canada Geese, only about 30 feet from my car.

Talk about a plan working out, 25 minutes from the hotel and a life bird in hand.  I usually allow myself 2 days on any life bird, then if I can’t find it time to move on.  Now what was I going to do, only 30 hours to kill until I was to board my next flight.

I was lucky enough to photograph a lovely Steller’s Jay at the information sign.  This si a very small NWR but lots of birds.

As I was driving out, I passed a large flock of  Geese, made up of 3 of the 4, Cackling subspecies;  Taverner, Richardson’s and Cackling.  I spent quite a bit of time looking through the flock looking for the Aleutian subspecies (which I finally caught up to later on my trip).

Moving on up to the Barview Jetty,  looking for Surfbirds but one look at the jetty told me their was no way I was going to go out there.

Not much happened on the was out to the jetty but on my walk back to the car in this gale, I was targeted by a group of gulls flying by the jetty.  It was raining guano, one gull was particularly accurate,  hitting me directly in the chest, all of my binoculars and a bit on my camera.   Let me tell you gull crap is not easy to remove from your binoculars and camera,  I’ll be more careful in the future and make sure I stand upwind.

I passed a small pond with a really nice Bufflehead drake and Ring-necked Duck hen

I found a small inlet that had a few Surf Scoter’s, greatly improving my images of this species.

The rest of the day and most of the next day was a total washout.  There was very heavy rain the rest of that day and most of the morning.  I was glad to get on that airplane, I’ll take snow over rain any day.

Bring on San Francisco…….

Ciao for now