Living in the maritime climate at the foot of the Coast Range in the northwest corner of Oregon, any day in which the ground is covered with at least an inch of sleddable snow is effectively a holiday. In all honesty, snow here means ice; un-navigable, stay-put-in-your-home ice. Thus the order of the day at Casa Riutta was baking, sledding, and digiscoping.

The difficulty with the latter two of these activities was that as the temperature was close to or below twenty degrees Fahrenheit all day, being outside was downright painful. Thus much of my digiscoping was done in a manner not generally advised by most any respectable digiscoper: I was shooting the images through a pane of window glass.

However even given my scofflaw attitude toward good digiscoping practices, the results were not too bad (these are uncropped and unretouched images):


Mourning Dove, Zenaida macroura


Varied Thrush, Ixoreus Naevius

The weather report for the remainder of the week is predicting temperatures below freezing all hours of the day and night – down into the single digits in fact. Perfect weather for a bit more digiscoping.

Peace and good bird watching.