The Portland Field Guide
A free guide to the wildlife of Portland and the Oregon coast — photographed in city parks, backyards and refuges, and written for the person who just saw something and wants to know what it was.
11 entries and growingEvery photograph here is my own. Most were made at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, which sits at the heart of this guide — but the range runs wider than one refuge: Sellwood and Willamette Park, the river itself, my own garden in Southeast Portland, and the beach at Neskowin on the coast.
Every entry pairs those photographs with real natural history — how a heron corrects for the way light bends in water, why screech owls depend on woodpeckers, what nearly wiped out the great white egret and what brought it back.
It is free, it has no paywall, and it always will.
Green Sweat Bee
The Birds and Bees of Oaks Bottom — field guide Green Sweat Bee Agapostemon sp. · family Halictidae · about 10mm When: April –…
Read the entry →Making the Light: Flash Macro, and a Field Guide I Have Been Quietly Planning
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.…
Read the entry →The Damselflies of Oaks Bottom
Five eyes, two sets of genitalia, wings with no pigment in them, and a childhood spent underwater as an ambush predator. Fourteen photographs from…
Read the entry →The American Kestrel: Portland’s Smallest Falcon
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…
Read the entry →The Ospreys of the Willamette
The bird that fishes the Willamette by falling out of the sky feet-first — the hover, the dive, the miss, and the climb back…
Read the entry →The Hawks of Portland
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…
Read the entry →The Owls of Oaks Bottom
There are owls in Oaks Bottom. Most people who walk the loop never see one, and that is not bad luck — it is…
Read the entry →Herons and Egrets of the Willamette
Three of them share the same water here, and most people only ever notice one. The great blue heron is unmissable — four feet…
Read the entry →Bald Eagles of Portland and Neskowin
There are two places I photograph bald eagles. One is a floodplain refuge inside the city of Portland, ten minutes from my house. The…
Read the entry →The Garter Snakes of Oaks Bottom
There is a moment, when something long and quick moves through the grass beside your foot, when the body decides before the mind does.…
Read the entry →The Bees Next Door
When people picture a bee, they picture a honeybee — hive, queen, honey, the whole operation. But most of the bees actually working your…
Read the entry →Nothing matches that yet
The guide is still growing — try a broader word like bird, owl, bee or heron, or clear the search to see every entry.
More on the way
New entries are added regularly. Still to come: the great blue heron rookery through a season, hummingbirds, the wood ducks, dragonflies, and the rough-skinned newt — which has its own long argument with the garter snakes already in this guide. Coast species from Neskowin are on the list too.
Free to read, funded by members
There is no paywall on any of this. Membership starts at $3/month and includes every high-resolution photograph in the shop, member-only field notes and video, and 20–30% off fine-art prints — and it is what keeps the guide growing.
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