Feathered Friends on a Hoquiam River Morning

Early Friday morning I went down to the river in Hoquiam, Wash., for coffee.

Lately I've been practicing the habit of taking the camera along whenever I go to the river; there's always something happening there, and Hive now offers a broad range of opportunity for sharing photos and video, even if one doesn't have enough for a full, long form post.

My intention Friday was to grab one or two photos that I could share in Picture A Day or on InLeo ... and I ended up letting my coffee go cold while I had a photo session with one of my favorite models.

I was walking along the Hoquiam River Loop, looking for a nice place to sit, when I saw this shorebird perched on a dock piling.

This is a sandpiper. I hesitate to identify it more specifically; there are 20 varieties of sandpiper listed on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site (see all 20 here), and I'm hard pressed to pick one with certainty. Perhaps it is a least sandpiper, because of its tiny size and yellow feet. But the bill is also yellow, which suggests a spotted sandpiper ... without spots on the breast!

You see the difficulty.

At any rate, the sandpiper was perched there perfectly with one of our tugboats providing a nice black background, which helped bring out the bill. I was using my 75-300mm zoom lens, so I didn't get a context shot of the tugboats lined up along the dock, but at right is an afternoon shot taken on another occasion.

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The Star of the Show

I noticed the star of this post after just three photos of the sandpiper. It was perched on another dock piling less than 25 yards away from where I had hunkered down on the riverbank, and I'm shocked that it didn't take off when I settled in.

I think I have about a million (only a slight exaggeration) photos of great blue herons flying away from me, but this one just sat there watching while I took photo after photo.

Eventually it flapped down to a piece of driftwood at the end of the dock to do some spear fishing.

Caught one!

It worked its way deep into the recess formed between the dock and the tugboat, almost disappearing from sight. You can just see it in this photo, beneath the tire next to the rope tying off the Wynema Spirit.

Observational Aside: It's fascinating to me, given all the complex gear that exists in the world, that our tugboats still just use old tires that might be found in a junkyard as bumpers. I guess it's good those tires are being put to use, though, instead of being burned.

After fishing for awhile, the heron stepped onto the dock and paced around a bit. At the time, I was trying to get a shot with my phone (to post to Waves), which didn't turn out. Then the tugboat operators showed up to start their day, and the heron moved off to a dock piling just slightly downriver, where it sat preening itself after its recent meal.

I didn't even have to move from my original position, just turned around and shot under the viewing platform the city has built there, for those who don't want to get muddy on the riverbank.

I took a short video of the heron preening (and posted it to 3Speak, my first ever shared there). Forgive the camera shake: I need to use a tripod for video, especially when I'm using the bulky zoom lens.

Soon I found myself really wanting some hot coffee, and I was excited to get home and look at what I had captured in my inadvertent photoshoot.

I left the heron there, preening and watching the river take on daylight.

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