Birds and Mountains

After a morning of ham and eggs breakfast, baking bread, recycling, washing and folding laundry and shed cleaning (I'll let you guess who did which - and you might be surprised), we headed down to Anacortes to see what birds we might find. It was a bit cloudy when we left, around noon, but cleared off nicely.

First stop - some ducks on a small pond.

American Widgeon

Bufflehead female

Ring Neck Duck - female

Ring Neck Duck - male

Greater Scaup - female

Widgeon and Bufflehead

Cedar Grove Pond - where we saw the ducks - you can see some in the distance. It was a great day for reflections too.

We drove on towards Anacortes - taking a side road along the shore - and found some seagulls harvesting  mussels in the bay - this is near Fidalgo Bay Resort - where we stayed last summer on vacation.

This gull just dove in the shallow bay to find a mussel

Seagull taking off from the shore

Ducks in the same bay

Pintail Ducks - I could hear their little whistling - and there they were - swimming in a row

I think Pintails are some of my favorites.

We stopped at Island Cafe in Anacortes for lunch - one of our favorites - good food for sure.

This was Don's burger - I had a plain burger, we shared the fries - delicious

And the mountains - oh the mountains

Mt. Baker was out - and I never pass up a chance to get a picture.

Taken from the Anacortes boat harbor - a ring of clouds below the peak

  It was time to head home - and as I looked to my left I could see Mt. Baker (taken from the freeway - between poles and trees as we zipped along, and no, I was not the one driving) - and far off to the right - what?  Could it be?  It was - Mt. Ranier. 

And there is Mt. Ranier - taken from the moving car.  Zoom at 140X

The map shows the driving distance between Bellingham and Mt Rainier - Mt Baker is just to the east (right) of Bellingham, in the edge of the green.  As the crow flies - it is about 110 miles between the two mountains.  The black arrow shows our location when I took the pictures of Mt. Ranier

Now we only see both mountains on days when the air is very clear - what an amazing treat.  I had to take the pictures of Mt. Ranier from the moving car - window rolled down - cold air (34 degrees) blowing in the car.  I got several shots that were blurry - several than had nice electric poles in the middle of the mountain.  Finally a good shot - just as we came to a place where we could no longer see Mt. Ranier.