PORTUGAL: TAGUS RIVER ESTUARY AND SR. LISBOA RESTAURANT

 June 25, 2022

During the Covid pandemic, Bob somehow got into birding. I'm still not sure how it happened. He has always loved wildlife photography, and so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he narrowed his focus to what he could see a lot of nearby. His interest in birds expanded as we took several trips to Texas during the last few years and on our trip to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands in March.

But who knew that PORTUGAL would be a birding paradise? Certainly not I.

Bob hired a private birding guide, Bernardo Barreto, to take us out looking for birds for a full day. He was an excellent guide, and in one day we saw 53 different species of birds. (For more about Bernardo, see his website here.) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bernardo picked us up at 7:30 AM. On our way out of town we saw this great mural. I have no idea what it means, but I like the anachronistic combination of the clothing and the can.

We traveled across the Vasco da Gama Bridge, opened in 1998. At 10.56 miles long, it is the longest bridge in the Europe Union. As a point of comparison, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego is 2.1 miles long, and the San Francisco Bay Bridge is 1.7 miles long. (On the other hand, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana is almost 24 miles long.)

The Tagus River ends its 626-mile journey in Lisbon and provides the city with its main port. Its estuary is the largest one in Western Europe. It is a critical spot for bird migration, hosting over 50,000 birds during the winter. A 35,000-acre nature reserve was established in 1976 to preserve the wetlands.

Bernardo had an impressive scope mounted on a tripod. The scope had something like 600x magnification. That, combined with his amazing eye for finding birds, made for a very successful day.

Another really amazing thing about Bernardo is that he can take pictures with a cell phone through the scope. I tried doing it, and I had 0% success. Almost all the bird pictures I have here were taken by Bernardo with my phone through his scope. Most of the time I have cropped the photo and rotated it, but they are still pictures he took.

The first bird we saw was a black-winged stilt.

NORTHEASTERN CALIFORNIA: LAVA BEDS NATIONAL MONUMENT

 September 6, 2020

On July 22, 2020, a thunderstorm rolled through northeastern California, and lightning strikes started several fires, including one in Lava Beds National Monument. Named the Caldwell Fire, it roared through over 83,000 acres before it was contained. The area, dense with ponderosa and lodgepole pine, had not seen fire in over 40 years.

About 70% of the park was scorched. If you do a Google image search of Lava Beds National Monument, you get photos like these that show trees and grasses growing on the perimeters of the lava beds . . .

From here

. . . and also throughout lava fields.

From here

When we turned into the park, we didn't realize what had occurred there six weeks before.

SOUTHERN OREGON, DAY 3: CRATER LAKE, THE PINNACLES, AND KLAMATH FALLS

 September 5, 2020

I was excited to visit Crater Lake, which, at 1,949 feet, is the deepest lake in the United States and the ninth deepest in the world. As its name implies, the lake is in a caldera that was formed by the collapse of a volcano 7,700 years ago.

Crater Lake is less than 10 miles from Diamond Lake, and as we were driving between the two lakes, we noticed a lot of fire damage. The 2020 Oregon wildfire season was one of the most destructive in the history of the state, similar to the 2020 California wildfire season. The fires had started the week we were there, and by the end of the season, over a million acres had burned. These trees had burned in a previous fire, but it gave us an idea of the devastation that the fires would cause in other places.

I was struck by the appearance of these burned trees. Don't they look like Watts Towers in South Los Angeles?

We weren't the only ones on our way to Crater Lake. This is the line at the ranger station.