Pacific Northwest wildlife

We mentioned mountain goats in our last blog post, prompting a friend to note that failing to include photos when writing about interesting wildlife is a social media faux pas. This post should help make up for that omission. We primarily relied on our phones for landscape photography during our recent travels, which has made it easy to blog while exploring the Pacific Northwest the last week and a half. In addition, D brought his birding gear. Although birding was far from the primary objective of our trip, D is now incapable of spending time outdoors without paying attention to the birdlife. The telephoto lens came in handy for the mountain goats, as well as various other cool critters we spotted on our hikes around the Cascades and further up north. With the trip winding down, we’ve finally found the bandwidth to do a photo dump. So while D now has a backlog of some 6,000 unsorted photos, we can share a few early favorites.

In addition to the aforementioned mountain goats, our most notable mammal sightings included sea otters, sea lions, and a far-off glimpse of humpback whales. We also saw a lone hoary marmot high above the snow line in the Cascades, as well as various squirrels, chipmunks, and deer — both mule and white-tailed — which we did not bother to photograph.

Unlike our final travels in Costa Rica, birding was far from the primary objective of this trip. Given that hiking and birding do not readily mix, D tried really hard to maintain the flow of our walks while birding along the way. The Merlin app helped tremendously in this endeavor. Rather than stop every time we heard a bird call out, D kept Merlin sound ID running on his phone as we hiked, stopping only when the app picked up a bird that was on his target list or when a bird perched close enough to the path to create a photo op.

This being summer in a northern region that has only a fraction of the avian diversity we enjoyed in the tropics, we did not see a ton: just north of ninety bird species across the entire ten-day trip — a total D could easily exceed in a single outing in Costa Rica or Colombia, which we visited several times during our assignment to San Jose. Even so, there were a number of noteworthy species.

D netted nine lifers during our Pacific Northwest travels, including the spectacular varied thrush and the beautiful harlequin duck — gravy on an immensely relaxing and restorative trip during which we caught up with good friends, enjoyed stunning vistas of the Cascades while hiking above the snow line, and fully recharged our batteries after a physically and emotionally exhausting conclusion to our Costa Rica Foreign Service tour.

Pictured from top to bottom: mountain goats, hoary marmot, chestnut-backed chickadee, varied thrush, harlequin ducks.