Opportunities on the Oregon Coast

      Over the Labor Day weekend I went with Mike to the Oregon Coast near Newport to visit my friend Wallace Kaufman, who lives five miles down a gravel road on the Poole Slough – in the boonies, as they say. Wallace is the 17th of the 75 friends I intend to visit before July 20, and a wonderful visit it was with good conversation, good food and wine, and great kayaking on the slough and in the bay, with opportunities in abundance for adding birds and animals to my 75s lists.  
      Here, for instance, is one of many harbor seals that bobbed around our kayaks in the bay.
   
  I also saw a nutria, an otter-like animal, swimming in the slough and many birds: great blue herons fishing from posts and trees; kingfishers in straight-line upriver dashes and gorgeous wing-fluttering displays as they settled on perches; a red-tail hawk, soaring on the wind currents; swallows; cormorants; gray jays; and beautiful, graceful white egrets.

Photo by Wallace Kaufman

   




     New vocabulary words that came from the long weekend include, besides nutria, Procrustean (to enforce uniformity without attention to individual differences); nonuple, relating to groups of nine, as in parallel with triple, quadruple, and quintuplets (learned from a New York Times crossword puzzle); and gam, a meeting of two ships, especially whaling ships, for an exchange of information, news, etc., a word I learned from Moby Dick, which I'm reading to Mike.



 Here is a picture of Mike and me having a gam on an early-morning kayak paddle to the bay.

Photo by Wallace Kaufman