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Discovering the Wild Places
A restroom search offers up a refuge
Usually, I spend much of the month of February traveling to nearby wildlife refuges to do photography. Not this February, however, as the coronavirus finally caught up to me (please stay home if you are ill — there are those of us who can get very sick from this virus), and I spent the entire month recovering from it. It is March now, and I am looking at photos and reminiscing about trips I’ve made in years past and how I first came to learn about these special places.
In 1998, I went on a road trip with my friend Mary to the top of the state of California to visit a place called Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge. I was already known as a bird photographer on the Central Coast of California, and other photographers encouraged me to visit what they felt was a premier location for bird photography, Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge.
The best time to visit wildlife refuges for migratory birds is during winter months, so we were there in January. Tule Lake Refuge was something of a disappointment for me, although we did see Swans and both Golden and Bald Eagles. I had expected a larger abundance of geese and ducks, but in truth, they were there; it is just that this is a large wetlands area, so birds are more spread out, and we didn’t see them in large groups.
