A sun dog appeared briefly at dawn Dec. 15, over the former Hoquiam paper mill site.
I had headed out that Saturday before first light, feeling pretty excited to be on my first Morning Pic venture in a few weeks. The plan was to push past the location of the most recent Morning Pic, beneath Simpson Avenue Bridge, to see if I could follow the bank of the Hoquiam River all the way around to “Dog Marsh” on the harbor. Usually I walk through town and enter the marsh area off Eighth Street, but after I explored under the bridge, I noticed that there was a walkable bank just beyond where I had set up for the bridge shoot. There’s no trail or anything, and it might be trespassing on railroad property – there’s a rail yard at the top of the bank – but I had to see if I could make it.
The river was several feet higher than it was for the bridge shoot. It covered the lower bank under the bridge, so I had to cut through the rail yard to get to the river. From the rail yard, the bank drops almost straight down about five feet to the lower bank, where the river had left about two feet (in some places less) of flat ground. I made my way along – through blackberry bushes, under the branches of an apple tree, and over shallow runoff from a storm we’d had the night before.
As the light increased, I noticed a heron perched on a dock piling across the river. A seal poked its head out of the water, in the exact center of the river, swimming out toward the harbor. Then I roused a kingfisher and a second heron from the bank. The kingfisher whipped over my head and out of sight, while the heron simply switched banks. With so much life stirring around me, I thought I could get some good shots if I could find a place to set the tripod, so I pushed on a little farther till I reached a driftwood log, where I could set the tripod and sight through the camera from a crouch.
The heron on the dock piling was really too far away to get a good shot, and the one I had roused from the bank had disappeared in the shadows. I’ve been tracking herons on the river since the beginning of the Morning Pic in September, and they have a way of lighting somewhere just out of range.
I decided to photograph the clouds while I waited to see what kind of animal life would show up. None did, but the sky changed rapidly as the sun rose, and I was delighted when the sun dog appeared.
My camera’s low battery light began flashing as I was photographing the bridge in today’s headline photo, and soon it died. I packed up and continued downriver, but just around the next bend I saw that the water reached all the way to the steep part of the bank. There was no getting through, and it seemed that my adventure was at an end.
Or so I thought. I stopped at Swanson’s for groceries on my way back along the Hoquiam River Loop, saving myself a three block walk home and then back. Twenty minutes later I was on the loop near Riverside Bridge – and stumbled across a heron in the river not fifteen feet away.
For months I’d been trying for a closeup of the heron, and now here I was with a dead camera battery and an armload of groceries!
I wondered if the battery had bounced back. I knew if I moved enough to put the groceries down, the heron would take off, so I just looped the bags around my forearms and worked the camera out of my pocket. It was awkward – I couldn’t bring the camera all the way up – but by leaning back and holding the camera at arm’s length, I managed to get my closeup.
Next time maybe I’ll convince the camera to focus on the heron, instead of the bushes in the foreground!
Morning Pic Update
This month I took a job at Washington Crab, a cannery out in Westport, Wash., right on the Pacific Coast. I catch the Grays Harbor bus for an hour-long ride around the harbor to the coast at 5:20 a.m., about two hours before dawn, Monday to Friday. I probably won’t be taking any morning pics during the week, but I sometimes have an hour to kill while I wait on the bus after work. There’s plenty of sea life to photograph in the marina and down by the ocean – harbor seals, sea lions, brown pelicans – and of course there’s the ocean waves, so I hope to share some pics from there in a new thread called Out in Westport.
Stay tuned!