Birding Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
I’d been wanting to schedule a multi-day trip down into Southern Washington, but it wasn’t until the end of January that I could schedule it. I booked three nights at the Best Western known Battle Ground and spent a few days primarily exploring Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. Weather was quite cold: early morning in the mid 20’s, and because of that, ice was forming on much of the open water around the refuge. It was typically all gone by early afternoon. Highs were around 40, and in general, it was clear and cloudless with the sun shining.
That’s actually a bit of a problem, since many of the best photography locations where the birds are were backlit, so I had to work to try to find situations where the lighting was as favorable as possible. Birding was quite good; I identified 51 species over the three days, including both tundra and trumpeter swans. My only view of sandhill cranes was a distant flight group of five, which was the only disappointment of the trip.
As a bit of a side trip, on the second day I wandered down into the Vancouver area, visiting a few locations including Frenchman’s Bar and Vancouver Lake. I was able to find a few nice species down there, including an almost cooperative Golden-Crowned Kinglet.
I’m satisfied with the photography; early on I was feeling really rusty and I wasn’t locking on focus well at all. That got better as I went along, especially day 2, but it’s a reminder I really need to get out and practive more between major shoots like this. Overall, I shot 1143 images, about typical for me for an outing like this. After going through all of the images and culling/processing, I ended up with 40 images from Ridgefield and 4 (of the Kinglet) from Vancouver Lake. 44 images, or about 3.8% of the shots is not a bad number for me from an outing like this, but if I’d been better with the camera, I could have possible doubled that. Still, I can’t complain. I ended up with photographs of 11 species.
If I do another outing this winter, it’ll likely be up into the Skagit region, but right now, I’m not sure about scheduling it. I’m looking at areas closer to home, interesting birds about an hour from here, to focus on for now.
This was my first major shoot since I made the decision to shift from Lightroom Classic to then mobile version. Overall, it went well and I’m happy with the results. It took much longer than my normal processing session, but I’m creating an entirely new workflow from scratch. Once I got it mostly worked out, it went pretty quickly but I’m still playing the “what keyboard shortcut did this change to?” game at times. Everything was processed in Lightroom, then exported as JPEGs and those fed through Topaz AI for final cleanup. Those cleaned up images were then imported back into Lightroom as my final images.
It was, overall, a nice, drama free short trip with some really nice birds and some decent photography. Can’t ask for much more.
