The Birds Were in the Parking Lot
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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
Category: Jonathan’s Journal
The Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part Three: Three Fishers, One Morning
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Three fishers on one morning at Oaks Bottom, and not one of them was doing it the way the book says. The kingfisher and the turtle In Part One I
Continue readingThe Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part Three: Three Fishers, One Morning
A Field Guide for Oaks Bottom, In Your Pocket
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Most people walk right past. A small bird drops into the willows at Oaks Bottom, flicks its tail once, and is gone. You saw it. You could even describe it
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The Hermit Thrush Sings in the Harmonic Series
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A small brown bird on the Oaks Bottom lookout deck — and one of the very few animals shown to choose its notes from the same overtone series that underlies human music. … Continue readingThe Hermit Thrush Sings in the Harmonic Series
The Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part Two: The Kingfisher Who Stayed
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Belted Kingfishers normally leave while you are still a hundred meters out. Yesterday one let me stay — and the sequence ends with her dropping off the branch and entering the water with her eyes shut. … Continue readingThe Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part Two: The Kingfisher Who Stayed
White Pelicans at Oaks Bottom: A First for Everyone on the Trail
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Two American White Pelicans dropped into Oaks Bottom last week — a first for me, and for everyone I met on the trail that afternoon. … Continue readingWhite Pelicans at Oaks Bottom: A First for Everyone on the Trail
The Fern Garden: How We Brought Back a Patch of Dead Ground
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There is a patch of ground at the end of my street that had stopped working. Not overgrown. Not messy. Dead. Bare packed clay under a stand of big leaf
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October at Oaks Bottom: What One Native Aster Was Holding Up
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Go down to Oaks Bottom in October, after the summer crowds have stopped coming and the trail is mostly dog walkers, and look at what is still in flower. It
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Honda CR-V Hybrid Trailer Wiring Without the Factory Tow Package
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The plug-and-play harness needs a factory tow package my hybrid didn’t have. Here is the custom 4-way install instead — including the driver’s-side 5V data wire that will lock your dashboard, and where the fuse must go. … Continue readingHonda CR-V Hybrid Trailer Wiring Without the Factory Tow Package
Storm Cloud Waltz and Forest Lullaby — and the Scores Are Yours
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Two original compositions set against Portland, the Oregon coast, and the animals of Oaks Bottom. Somebody said their blood pressure dropped twenty points watching one of them. Somebody else read the score while it played. If you play, both scores are yours. … Continue readingStorm Cloud Waltz and Forest Lullaby — and the Scores Are Yours
Making the Light: Flash Macro, and a Field Guide I Have Been Quietly Planning
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Two afternoons in eighty-degree heat with a Godox AD200Pro and a 40-megapixel Fuji taught me that the shutter is not what freezes a bee. Here are the long-horned bees of Oaks Bottom, and the field guide all of this is building toward. … Continue readingMaking the Light: Flash Macro, and a Field Guide I Have Been Quietly Planning
My Photographs Are a Revenue Stream — For Nextdoor
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Three of my posts, three advertisements I never approved, and roughly $1,200 of advertising revenue that went to the company hosting them. Then I read Nextdoor’s own documentation and found out the ads had never stopped — I had just stopped seeing them. … Continue readingMy Photographs Are a Revenue Stream — For Nextdoor
The Damselflies of Oaks Bottom
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Five eyes, two sets of genitalia, wings with no pigment in them, and a childhood spent underwater as an ambush predator. Fourteen photographs from the lake shore, and how to tell one from a dragonfly. … Continue readingThe Damselflies of Oaks Bottom
Build Your Own Tiny Refuge
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I live on a city lot in Portland. The whole garden would fit in a lot of people’s living rooms — and it is the most effective stress relief I have ever found. What the science actually says, what brings the wildlife in, and why small does not mean insignificant. … Continue readingBuild Your Own Tiny Refuge
The Only Wealth That Matters
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I am 54, on no medication, and earlier this summer I did a thousand pushups in a day. Not to impress you — so you know this comes from practice. Why health is the only thing you actually own, and what it genuinely costs. … Continue readingThe Only Wealth That Matters
Forest Bathing: The Health Practice I Was Doing Without Knowing It
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Two to three hours a day in the woods with a camera. It turns out the Japanese have a name for it and decades of research behind it — plus a few mechanisms most articles leave out. … Continue readingForest Bathing: The Health Practice I Was Doing Without Knowing It
The American Kestrel: Portland’s Smallest Falcon
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Four ounces of falcon. Two foveae in each eye, ultraviolet vision, and a habit of landing on twigs that move. Seven photographs of Oregon’s smallest raptor, and how to tell one from everything else. … Continue readingThe American Kestrel: Portland’s Smallest Falcon
The Ospreys of the Willamette
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The bird that fishes the Willamette by falling out of the sky feet-first — the hover, the dive, the miss, and the climb back out. Photographed from the Sellwood Bridge. … Continue readingThe Ospreys of the Willamette
The Hawks of Portland
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Two completely different birds share the name hawk. Learn to tell a buteo from an accipiter and the whole city reorganizes itself. Red-tailed, red-shouldered and Cooper’s hawks, photographed in Oregon. … Continue readingThe Hawks of Portland
The Owls of Oaks Bottom
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There are owls in Oaks Bottom. Most people who walk the loop never see one, and that is not bad luck — it is the entire design. An owl’s daytime