BIRD OF THE WEEK NO. 19

Black Oystercatcher

THE BEACH AND TINY SPIT at Point Hudson are just blocks from my home and rich with mixed flocks of shorebirds, ducks, geese, and gulls that vary with the seasons. The calmer water of a small adjacent harbor attracts the occasional merganser or harbor seal, and a kingfisher likes to preside over the scene from the top of a sailboat’s mast. On a visit a couple days ago, I saw two dozen Brants—small, dark-brown geese with white underbellies and necklaces—congregated on the spit while a pair of newly arrived Caspian Terns fished the coast. Point Hudson is also a good spot to see the sunrise, whose location rotates south toward Mt. Rainier in the winter and north toward Mt. Baker in the summer. On a good day—a friend calls them “Two-Fuji Days”—you can see both mountains. The time the sun rises likewise varies over the year, from eight o’clock at winter solstice to five o’clock in the summer. Right now, the sun is inching closer to Baker and comes up at a quarter to six. When the cloud cover isn’t too dense, a gorgeous orange light, often tinged with yellows, pinks, and purples, silhouettes the peaks of the Cascades before slowly spilling over them. In different shades and intensities, it lasts for nearly an hour. If I spy the colored light early enough from our second-floor window, and the tide isn’t too high, I can grab my gear and reach the beach in just a few minutes.

BLACK OYSTERCATCHERS ARE frequent visitors to Point Hudson, and they stand out in a crowd. While not as large as most gulls, they dwarf the sanderlings that often hunt with them. Against the oystercatchers’ chocolate-brown bodies, it’s hard to miss their long orange bills, ridiculously pink legs, and bright yellow eyes. I’ve seen them in couples—they remain paired year-round—and in groups as large as six. Once, a couple of them accused me of trespassing and flew menacing circles overhead, screaming and swooping. Perhaps I was too close to a nest. Most of the time they are content, after a suitable trial period, to let me to watch them turn over the beach rocks for marine creatures left by the tide. Though I like to shoot low to the ground, I’m finding it a bit harder lately to lie down on the wet rocks with my camera and to get back up once I’m down. But on a morning a few years ago, I laid eye-to-eye with this roosting oystercatcher, bill tucked, just as the sun began to illuminate the warm colors of its glorious eye.

Nikon D500, 500mm, f8@1/500, ISO 1,000