Various Oregon Birding Piks: Tillamook Campout

8/14/19

Hi Folks,

Recently our sister in law volunteered to stay with Rosie’s mother so as to provide us a break. This was with less than a week’s notice, but we made plans to take the camper over to the coast. We started looking into the main campground at Newport, straight west from where we live, but ended up going more north, to the Tillamook area, and stayed at the Barview County Park Campground, where the jetties are, between which much water flows into and out of Tillamook Bay. There are about 6-7 such places in Oregon, and these are all great places for birders as they provide a way to get a little beyond the surf to observe birds just off shore.

The weather was simply splendid the entire 3 days: not much wind, the ocean was calm, and the temps were in the mid 70s all the time. We walked a few miles each day up and down the beach. I even walked out to the end of the north jetty three times, something discouraged in less than optimal weather. On Tuesday I went for a birding foray with Jimmy Billstine, a good birding friend from the area and added one species to my Tillamook County list, a Willow Flycatcher.

It was nice to just chill out and not have a set schedule to adhere to. Makes us look forward to retirement even more. We brought along some firewood and had the traditional campfire each night. We had not been camping over at the northern coast in many years, and one thing we could not help but notice was that the majority of the other campers were Hispanic. I had some mixed feelings for a while, but ended up being more complementary to see those of a different culture displaying good family values and earning a decent living. Just wish my Spanish was better.

I ended up taking over 1200 pictures! Sometimes it is easy to sort through them, knowing you eventually got a great pic of a certain bird, and you could simply delete the dozens of lesser quality ones taken beforehand. Other times it was not so easy. Eventually I whittled it down to about 50 or so (I have not counted). As the pelicans were much in evidence, and as I wanted to get them soaring over and diving, I had to go through about 200 to find the few you see here. It was fun to try to get them diving for fish. I did not get any to my satisfaction, so these will have to do.

The sunsets were fairly good and we enjoyed 3 of them. We hoped to see the green flash, but it is quite difficult this far north, and probably not possible when there are clouds on the horizon. It was fun to see about 50 others each night taking in the sunset. This is an older campground, and so the sites are spread out and roomy, with lots of conifers for privacy (and birds). We had a few rodent visitors all the time: California Ground Squirrels, Western Chipmunks and Chickarees, those darks squirrels here in the west. There was one such squirrel who would climb up to the top of the spruce trees around the campsite, bite off the cones, sending them down to the ground. He was amazing! They were literally coming down every 2-3 seconds at times, even making a racket when landing on the roof of our camper. The grounds in the vicinity were strewn with small cones and he would later go through them, carting off to his stash the ones he liked best.

We were hoping to empty our holding tanks at the campground waste disposal area, but we learned they charged $10. Ah, modern technology comes in handy again. I knew there was a web site which listed the free dumping places in Oregon, found it, and saw there was one at the Spirit Mountain Casino, which was en route home. It was also a convenient place to stop for lunch.