This Space for Rent

« Out on the line · Picture of the day »

Out on the line

I had to run a couple of errands on the west side of Portland today, but, as usual, I looped through downtown Portland via the Springwater Trail to get there (it would be faster to just jump across the Sellwood Bridge, but where’s the sport in that?) Normally, the Springwater Trail is a pretty fast run to downtown – it’s ~6km, sheltered from most of the wind, and generally downhill from Tacoma street to the end of the line by OMSI – but it wasn’t today, because as I transited the Portland Traction embankment east of Oaks Park, I spotted this juvenile Osprey sitting at the edge of its nest. It was peeping up a storm, sounding very distressed, and another osprey was poking about in the nest, so I stopped the bicycle, pulled out my Pentax and started taking pictures.

I didn’t see the other osprey any longer, but the peeping sounds were getting louder and, funnily, were now also coming from the other side of the trail. I moved a little bit ahead, looked over to the other side, and saw that the other osprey must have just taken its first solo flight out of the nest and was now clinging to a branch in absolute terror, and peeping as if it was a 1000 horsepower sparrow.

This went on for quite some time, but, eventually it realized that this branch was just like the nest back on the other side, so it stopped cringing, adjusted its feathers, and finally lifted off and flew back to the nest, where it collapsed into a quivering jelly (I presume it collapsed into a quivering jelly because once it got back to the nest I didn’t see anything except for an occasional wingtip.) And, needless to say, my hopes for a quick run through downtown had vanished several hundred pictures ago.

—orc Tue Jul 14 23:57:31 2009

Comments

Comments are closed