Top to bottom: Ruby Beach, Mountain Beaver, Sooty Grouse, Pine Grosbeak, North Cascades
Ok, I confess that I live here, so I am biased. I do travel a fair amount though, and my work as a birding and natural history guide takes me to amazing places around the world. One of the most amazing places is right here in Washington State.
Recently I was the local guide for a ten-day Massachusetts Audubon Northwest birding tour in Washington. Although I had previously been to almost every place on the itinerary, I was struck — no, awed — by the beauty and natural diversity of our state. As a resident, you generally visit one or two of these places at a time. On this trip, we strung together ten days worth of spectacular places, which were not coincidentally also great birding and wildlife-watching sites. Here are some of the places we visited:
- Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge
- Lake Quinault/Quinault River Rain Forest
- Ruby, Kalaloch and 4th beaches on the Pacific coast
- Lake Crescent/Marymere Falls
- Dungeness Spit National Wildlife Refuge
- Hurricane Ridge
- Crockett Lake, Ebey’s Landing and Deception Pass State Park, Whidbey Island
- Rockport State Park
- Washington Pass
- Beaver Pond, Methow Valley
- Confluence State Park, Wenatchee
- Waterfront Park, Leavenworth Fish Hatchery, and Icicle Gorge, Leavenworth
Along the way, we experienced quite a few extraordinary sightings, including:
- American Avocet and Yellow-headed Blackbirds at Nisqually Wildlife Refuge
- Glaucous Gull at Kalaloch Beach
- Mountain Beaver emerging from a snowbank on Hurricane Ridge
- Sooty Grouse displaying just below Hurricane Ridge
- Black Swifts flying low to the water at Cranberry Lake, Deception Pass State Park
- Clark’s Nutcracker and Pine Grosbeak perched on snow banks at Washington Pass
- Red-naped Sapsucker and Mountain Orchids at Beaver Pond, Methow Valley
- Yellow-bellied Marmots scurrying in and out of rock piles at Confluence State Park
- A Mule Deer waiting expectantly for us to cross a pedestrian bridge, then suddenly crossing it with us, close enough to reach out and touch as it pranced by.
These experiences were part of a bigger picture comprised of a rich array of biomes ranging from temperate rainforest, to salt marsh wetlands, to alpine meadows, to montane pine forest, to shrub-steppe. The average rainfall of the areas we visited ranged from 140 inches near Lake Quinault to 8 inches in the Columbia basin. What a remarkable, diverse and beautiful state!
