Urban Wildlife... and then some

Franklin and I are still in Portland, Oregon. A few weeks ago we left the houseboat where we were staying and moved nearby to a house next to a park. We were only vaguely aware of the nearby park/wetlands area, but it has turned out to have really enhanced the quality of our lives. There is a stream and ponds with a nice assortment of wildlife. I must say seeing all the wildlife inside a major city has been a big surprise.

A section of the park has a boardwalk. This is where we get our best wildlife viewings. 

At sunset, all the critters come out for dinner. We mostly see blue herons, ducks, geese, squirrels, and nutria. There are also river otters and beavers but I am not sure if I have seen any of those.  My first night I went out for a sunset stroll with no expectations, yet wound up taking over a hundred photos. Since then I organize my evenings around a sunset stroll. Here are a few photos.

My first evening walk. Probably taken on a cell phone.

Birds of a feather flocking together, so here are a few more blue heron photos.

This is the mating season. I don't know much about birds so I can only assume that accounts for the bright blue color. 

There are not as many geese here as they were on the river, a few blocks away. Possibly geese are fish eaters. This creek is supposed to have salmon but I haven't seen any.  

The wildlife that interested me the most were the nutria. We used to see them canoeing (us canoeing, not the nutria) in streams along the Oregon coast, but rarely saw them this close. 

 Nutria are large rodents that look a lot like beavers, although they are a little smaller, and have thin, rat style tails. Under the top layer of long coarser fur is a softer fur, not unlike mink. This is just hearsay, of course. I didn't get to check this out firsthand. 

From my limited experience, it seems that nutria eat nonstop at this time of day.

This nutria lives in a part of the stream that runs alongside a community garden. I suspect he has a very balanced diet of fruits and vegetables. 
He certainly wasn't afraid of us when we walked by. He just turned his back waiting for us to leave, like a cat would. 

I am not sure whether the photo below features a beaver, river otter, or another nutria. The nutria seem to eat as they go so I am guessing this is a beaver.

Mostly we see ducks. And since we walk by at dinner hour they often they look like this. 

Or like this: 

Or maybe they are washing up after dinner

Or settled down to sleep. 

I like to take photos and over time have taken a lot of wildlife photos. So I thought while I am sharing wildlife pictures I would share a few older photos too.

These first few are from Florida. We lived there for almost 20 years.

A pelican with a few friends in the Florida Keys 

A squadron of pelicans off Sanibel Island where we lived. Yes, that is the term for a group of pelicans. 

I didn't take this photo myself,but I thought you'd enjoy it.

An anhinga in Everglades National Park. Although they can swim, their feathers are not waterproof so they have to dry their feathers before he can fly again. Actually, they are kind of fascinating to watch. They look like snakes in the water with their bodies submerged and just their necks peaking out. 

These are elephant seals that live near Hearst Castle near Cambria, California. They are enormous (these males weigh more than a ton and are more than 15 feet long) . Thety are so huge that they find moving on land exhausting, so they rest a lot and only move a few feet at a time. I find them pretty entertaining though. 
Since this beach is pretty inconvenient they can be viewed on a webcam, (elephantseal.org). Just one of the many attractions of a California coast road trip. I didn't post any photos of them on my April California blog though.

This photo is a little further afield. These Magellan penguins live on a small island in southern Chile, off Chiloe Island, at the end of the contiguous Pan American Highway that starts in Alaska. 

These penguins have this tiny island to themselves and we had this small boat to ourselves, watching them. And judging from this photo, they were watching us watching them. 

A different view of a penguin from the Montery Aquarium. 

Some ravens in Bryce National Park in Utah

Not a plant. This is s seahorse!

This is a real photos not plastic. They are exotic seahorses from the Montery Aquarium. 

This concludes the wildlife show.

Ok. Maybe not. I don't know if I'll ever post wildlife photos again so I'd better include some bears.
These first two were in Alaska, in Denali National Park. Fortunately, on the other side of a river.

This mama black bear was offshore Vancouver Island last summer. She is on the beach to eat little clams living under those rocks.

This is the same mama bear (probably) and in front of her are her cubs. A wonderful experience watching them. We have actually taken the same wildlife boat tour the last two summers to have moments like this. If you go to Tofino, BC ask me about this boat tour. We have taken three boat tours and liked this one so much we repeated it two years in a row. 

Last but not least I wanted to share my baby raccoon photo. 

We were strolling through our favorite park in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (an urban beach town). But this beach park was untouched, unspoiled Old Florida and we visited it often in the years when we went to Ft. Lauderdale to visit Franklin's mother.  

This raccoon was with his mama. She cross the path ahead of me, but he didn't have time to catch up to her,  so he climbed this palm tree. Here he is peeking out to see if I was gone yet to see it if was safe to climb down and join his mother. This is not a great photo but it was a great moment.  

Next week we are heading to Vancouver Island for the summer.  We are renting a house on the water in Victoria so a sighting of Pacific Grey Whales would be nice.  But the house is near the cruise port so I am not too hopeful of spoting any sealife.