Found At Last

It really exists. The Snipe. What multitudes of Scouts have been dispatched with flashlights into the scary woods to hunt over the generations. So I always assumed it was a myth, a hoax perpetrated on the young. But I saw one today, a brown shore bird hunkered down next to a pond at Nisqually.

We had a very productive Bird Walk, 20 to 30 people mostly experts at spotting, hearing, and identifying hundreds of species of birds, the birders stalking like insects with extra metal legs as they haul their spotting scopes on their backs around the refuge.

A spotting scope is a wondrous device, much more powerful than my binoculars [ancient, heavy Porro binoculars 7 X 35 with individually focused lenses which I carry around my neck by a leather thong, the original strap having disintegrated as soon as I inherited them from my father. His name, Lewis A. Elwood, on label-maker strips from the '70's, is attached to the scuffed brown leather case.] A spotting scope has a very narrow view, making it hard to locate the bird independently with naked eye or binoculars, but shows individual feathers with a breathtaking resolution.

I was able to see, with or without assistance spotting them:

Peregrine falcon
Snipe
Rufous Hummingbird
Anna's Hummingbird
A coyote down the dike road, lurking about and wishing this crowd of people would disperse so he could hunt
Cinnamon Teal pair
Ruddy Duck
Yellow-Throated Warbler
Redtail hawk
A  muskrat
Mergansers
Buffle Heads
Northern Shovelers
Pintails
Redwing Blackbirds, a favorite from my youth in Eastern Washington
Two [or more] Tree Swallows, brilliant blue back and light front, delicate
Cormorants
Mew Gulls
Greater Yellowlegs
Song sparrows
A rabbit
Kingfisher
Eagles on a nest
Great Blue Herons
Very Large Wheeling Flock of Geese
Marsh Wren

And because I decided to accompany the de facto leader back by a longer route than I would have taken, I spotted a tiny hummingbird on a nest because overhead I heard a "tick, tick, tick", looked up and it was there, just settling into a tiny nest which looked exactly like all the thousands of clumps of lichen nearby. Also, I was particularly blessed, because the leader spotted them and had them in his scope, to view two juvenile Great Horned Owls snuggled on an aspen branch, indistinguishable from dozens of other aspens. Finally, nearly a year from when I started visiting the Refuge and coming on Bird Walks, I saw not one, but two owls.