Harlequin Ducks at Cannon Beach

I started my trip to the Pacific Northwest with my sights set on orcas and puffins. A week on the cruise ship Ruby Princess, sailing out of San Francisco and visiting Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, not to mention two days on the open Pacific Ocean, seemed to all offer good chances at spotting these sea creatures. Just a couple of hours after leaving San Francisco, I watched a humpback whale breaking the water's surface and diving, its flukes rising in the air and illuminated by the golden light of the setting sun. It was hard not to be excited about what else I'd discover on my weeklong cruise!

The first stop was Astoria in Oregon. It's the oldest American-founded city west of the Rocky Mountains and is near the terminus of the Lewis and Clark expedition. While many tourists visit the explorers' settlement, Fort Clatsop, I was more interested in the area's natural history. As a result I rented a car and drove twenty-five miles south along the coast, to Cannon Beach, famous for its large shoreside sea stack - a geological water-carved form - called Haystack Rock.

At low tide you can walk to the formation which might be the most photographed landmark on all of the Oregon coast. Less well known is that tufted puffins nest and reside on Haystack Rock from mid-spring to late summer. Alas when I visited the area at the end of September there were unfortunately no remaining stragglers on the rock or in the area, all the puffins having returned to their life at sea for the next eight months. Only seagulls were visible through the mist in the clumps of grass that recently acted as puffin nests.

It was also high tide, so I couldn't get close to Haystack or investigate any tidal pools. However in the churning water between the coastline and the monolith I noticed several seabirds floating and diving. Snapping some photos with my zoom lens, I soon identified the birds as harlequin ducks.

The ducks were a good substitute to assuage my disappointment in missing the puffins; I had never seen the species before and it was the first time I ever birded in their geographic range. The ducks were probably beginning their wintering season in the area, after breeding inland over the summer.

The individuals looked like males, still sporting their breeding colors and their distinctive, bold stripes and markings, a costume supposedly reminiscent of Harlequin, a comic character in Renaissance Europe theater. Other names for the bird include painted duck and totem pole duck, just as apt descriptive titles.

Barely beginning my visit to the Pacific Northwest, the encounter was an exciting first lesson in local birding, humbly reminding me of Lewis and Clark's own Corps of Discovery Expedition to the area over two hundred years ago.