The Birds Were in the Parking Lot

I was coming back from a session at Oaks Bottom when someone asked if I was Jonathan Swanson from Nextdoor.

That keeps happening now, and I still do not know what to do with my face when it does. They were a couple, and they were genuinely interested, so I pulled out my phone and showed them the bird guide — the free one, the whole refuge, every species with its call. They had no idea it existed. Most people do not.

Then I drove to the Whole Foods in Lake Oswego, because I also needed groceries.

I did not go in

The light stopped me in the parking lot.

It was late October, around four, when the sun gets behind the west hills and everything gets about twenty minutes of being beautiful. Across the street from the store there is a park that looks out over the lake. I stood there with a cart I had not picked up yet and decided the groceries could wait.

They waited about an hour.

The birds I had to work for

Two of them, in the shallows. Tall, long-legged, feeding out in open water rather than along the edge where you expect a shorebird to be — out in it, almost deep enough to float.

My first thought was Whimbrel, and I want to be honest about that, because a Whimbrel here would have been a real record. They are a coastal bird. They move through Oregon mostly in late summer. Two of them inland, at a lake in Lake Oswego, in the last week of October, is the kind of sighting that gets looked at twice.

So I went and looked at the pictures instead of at what I wanted.

A Whimbrel has a bill that curves down, and a boldly striped crown — two dark stripes with a pale one between them. These birds had a straight bill and a finely streaked head. That settled it, and it did not take long.

What they are is Greater Yellowlegs, and for once the name is the field mark. Bright yellow legs, a bill about half again as long as the head, and a body roughly twice the bulk of the little sandpipers most people picture when you say shorebird.

Watch where they are standing. Most shorebirds work the waterline — the wet edge, the mud, the last inch of it. These two are out in water deep enough to lift them, and still walking.

Then watch the bill. It is not probing down into the bottom the way a dowitcher stitches through mud. It is sweeping sideways through the water, because this bird is chasing small fish instead of digging for worms. Different job, different tool, and you can see the difference in ten seconds of video in a way no photograph will ever show you.

Which brings me to the frame I took for the look of it, and which turned out to be the most useful one of the evening.

I took that one because low sun on water makes a nice silhouette. But look at what is actually in it. The bill length against the head, the depth of the bill at its base, the leg length, where the wingtips fall against the tail — every single thing you need to name this bird is in that outline, and none of it depends on color.

That matters more than it sounds. Low sun is a liar about color. In the warm frames above, this bird’s gray bill base photographs pink, which is a mark that belongs to a godwit, and I spent a while chasing that before I checked it properly. The silhouette has no opinion about color at all. It cannot mislead you, because it is not telling you anything except shape.

The other thing about a Greater Yellowlegs is that it does not shut up. Three or four loud ringing notes, usually as it decides you are too close and leaves. Hunters used to call this bird the tattler, or the telltale, for exactly that reason — it is the first thing in a marsh to take alarm and the loudest about it, and it gave away the hunter to every duck within half a mile.

Here is the part I did not expect. This is one of the least-studied shorebirds in North America, and not because it is rare. Thousands of people see them every year. But they nest in boreal muskeg — floating bog, standing water, clouds of insects, nests scattered thin across country almost nobody can walk into. A bird you can find in a city park in October has a breeding life that is still only roughly described.

They are now number 85 in the free field guide, with their call — recorded, as it happens, at Smith Bybee Wetlands in North Portland.

There was also an eagle

Sitting on the dock rail, in the same hour, about as casually as a crow.

Clean white head, clean white tail, all-yellow bill. That is a full adult, which means it is at least five years old — Bald Eagles do not finish the white head until their fifth year. Before that they are a mottled brown mess, and I get asked about young ones every season by people who are certain they have found a Golden Eagle.

In 1963 there were 417 known nesting pairs in the entire lower forty-eight states. This one was on a boat dock railing a few hundred feet from a grocery store, and the genuinely remarkable part is that nobody walking past was looking at it.

That is the best wildlife news of my lifetime, and it has become ordinary. Which is exactly what we were trying for.

And then the heron

I was about to leave.

A Great Blue Heron came in to land on the boat dock, with the sun behind it. For about one second it was all the way open — wings fully spread and cupped forward, legs down, tail fanned. The light came through from behind and lit the trailing edge of every single feather, so the bird went dark in the middle and burned at the edges.

For that second it did not look like a heron at all. It looked like the Phoenix.

I want to be accurate about what it was doing, because it is better than the version people assume. That is not a pose and it is not a display. It is braking. A big bird coming down fans everything it has to shed speed — wings all the way out and cupped forward, tail open, legs reaching. The most mythic shape a Great Blue Heron ever makes is the shape of stopping, and it holds it for about a second before folding up and standing there looking like a coat rack.

The only reason there is a sharp picture of a one-second event is shutter speed, and the only reason I had the shutter speed is that I was shooting into the sun. Bright light behind the subject forces a fast exposure, fast enough to stop a wingtip that is still moving. It is the same decision that turned the yellowlegs into a black outline an hour earlier. Point into the light and you give up the color, and what you get back is speed.

Except the joke turned out to be on me. The phoenix the Greeks wrote about was not Greek. Herodotus describes it as an Egyptian bird, and the Egyptian original is the Bennu — a god of the sun, of the Nile flood, and of rising again.

The Egyptians drew the Bennu as a heron.

So nature was not outdoing mythology on that dock. It was showing me where the myth came from in the first place.

I did eventually get the groceries

And this is the part that undid me.

At the register I mentioned I had been across the street photographing birds. The cashier was not impressed, because she already has birds. There is a nesting pair of Ospreys in the Whole Foods parking lot, and as far as the staff are concerned their defining characteristic is what they do to the cars underneath.

I had parked under them. I had walked past them with a camera on my shoulder, to go across the street and look for wildlife.

They are not there right now — Ospreys leave Oregon by about the end of September and spend the winter in Mexico and South America, so the nest is empty and the cars get a reprieve until April. But they will be back, on the same structure, to the same complaints.

Two hundred feet

So the tally for one unplanned hour: two shorebirds I had never photographed, a bald eagle, a heron that turned into a myth, and a pair of ospreys I did not even notice because they live over the parking spaces.

I did not get up early. I did not drive anywhere for this. I was buying groceries.

That is most of why I built the guide, and it is why I showed it to two strangers in a parking lot earlier the same day. You do not need a wilderness. You need twenty minutes, and a willingness to look at the water instead of getting in the car — and sometimes not even that, because some of it is nesting directly above where you parked.