"Sideways" on Tour

As if on cue, the clouds returned to the Pacific Northwest as Mountaineers Books' released my new book, A Sideways Look at Clouds. The clouds never do anything on cue, so their timing is notable here. (Even stranger, Hurricane Maria made landfall as I was starting my book tour).

The clouds have been dramatic this fall and I've been on the road encouraging readers to look up and enjoy the every-changing drama in the skies at bookstores and other venues in Olympia, Seattle, Bellingham, Marysville, Kirkland, Portland, and Washington, DC. (Check out my events calendar for upcoming talks and book signings).

More than talking about my book and sharing some of my photos of the spectacular clouds we have in the Pacific Northwest, I've loved answering their questions about clouds: How exactly does it rain? When is a cloud a "cloud" and when do you call them "clouds?" Why do we have so many clouds here? What's the deal with high and low pressure? Are clouds changing? I am going to create a FAQs page to answer all of these and more.

I've also loved hearing people's stories about clouds. Here is one story (handwritten) and delivered to me at the 2017 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) trade show by Mary Anne Fraser, manager of Brilliant Moon books in Shelton.

"100 years ago, when I'd just turned twelve, I spent met hard-earned babysitting wages on a small Kodak camera. Within an hour the complete roll was filled and my mom (knowing how excited I'd been about this long-awaited purchase) offered to take the roll to our local "Pay and Save" to have my photos developed.

The week-long wait was finally over and I ran to the car to discover what my new hobby had delivered. Before I could open the obviously already opened packet, my mom said to me in a rather disappointed voice: "They're all clouds."

I looked at her, waiting for the rest of the observation ("They're beautiful." "I love the one that looks like an otter." "What an artist's eye you have.") but, alas, that was the sum total of her opinion.

I, on the other hand, was thrilled. Yes, they WERE all clouds."

While in Portland, I visited KATU-TV to talk with Helen Raptis on "AMNW" and Tra'Renee Chambers on "Afternoon Live" and also with Jefferson Smith, host of "XRAY in the Morning" (skip to 1:54:48) before my talk at Powell's on Hawthorne

After my interview on "Afternoon Live," the on-set photographer, Mark Plut, showed me photographs of his two recent paintings--of clouds!  "I too am fascinated by clouds," Mark told me, "especially how to paint them." In the first painting, Mark as painted a sky washed with what look like cirrostratus clouds to me. In the second painting, the landscape is transformed by more dynamic cumulus and altocumulus clouds. What a difference, eh? Thank you, Mark!

And because you can never have too many clouds--or paintings of clouds--in the Pacific Northwest, I went on a cloud hunt at the Portland Museum of Art. What a bonanza of clouds! Here is a gallery of a few of my favorites. 

Oskar Kokoschka/Tuileries Gardens, Paris; George Inness/Apezzo Pass, Titian's House; Joe Goode/Torn Cloud Painting; Robert Henri/Rue de Rennes; Robert Goonough/Grey Development; N.C. Wyeth/Rip Van Winkle, endpaper illustration; [forgot to photograph the label of the skyscrapers in the clouds--ooops]; George Michel/Landscape; ibid/detail of cloud

REMEMBER....EARTH WITHOUT ART is JUST "EH"

Speaking of...I'll be signing books at the 37th Annual  Wild Arts Festival at Montgomery Park in Portland, OR. The festival runs November 18-19 and benefits the fabulous Audubon Society of Portland. I'll be there Sunday noon-4 p.m. along with 36 other authors (and more than 200 artists) whose work is inspired by nature.

Marbled Murrelets in the Wild

The Marbled Murrelets put on quite a show on the wild central Oregon Coast this week during the Portland Audubon Society's  9th annual Marbled Murrelet citizen survey.

Please hover and click your way through the photo gallery above to see scenes from the morning survey in Audubon's Ten-Mile Creek Sanctuary (where sanctuary manager Paul Engelmeyer lead one of several groups of pre-dawn surveyors) and the coastal area near Yachats where we later observed these fast-flying, forest-nesting seabirds on the water just beyond the breakers (with the help of Kim Nelson, Oregon State University).

You might think that getting up at 4 a.m. is not your cup of tea, but you'll find yourself gulping in every minute of the morning when you are standing in a grassy meadow lighted with fog-diffused moonlight and across the creek from stands of old-growth spruce, hemlock, cedar, and fir. You can feel the life in this sanctuary where the forest is being lovingly restored to balance, where the dawn chorus of thrushes, robins, grosbeaks, and waxwings are so loud you fear they will drown out that cherished keer call of the bird you have come all this way to hear.

Luckily, there is nothing quite like the piercing call of the marbled murrelet. Our group of eight is intent on hearing the call and catching a glimpse of a fast-flying Marbled Murrelet as it flies from the ocean some three miles to the west and the old-growth forest where it are incubating an egg or feeding a chick.

It takes most of us a while to calibrate our ears to high-pitched call and to figure out where exactly to look in homogenous depth of gray fog to look for the tiny fleeting forms of the murrelet. It is easy to mistake mosquitoes and the floaters in your eyes for marbled murrelets.

Thankfully,  the murrelets called loudly, often, and gave us time to find them in the sky. Everyone got the hang of it. While many flew above or in the fog, we did  see many murrelets flying below the fog--in  solo, in pairs, and in groups of four and five. They made their keer calls and the "alternate" or "groan" calls--the one I think sounds like a murrelet impersonating a duck playing a kazoo. They circled over the meadow and behind the trees. They flew silently. They had us pointing, turning, spinning in the meadow. It was spectacular.

Knowing what I know about the marbled murrelet, one glimpse of this bird or one burst of keer calls is more satisfying to me than the experience I had the day before of seeing  thousands of Common Murres just offshore (below).

So common. Just one of the off-shore colonies of Common Murres (and  few cormorants) near the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Newport, Oregon. You could watch, hear, study, photograph, or paint the 65,000 murres here all day long! (Photo by MM Ruth)

Alas, I have no photographs of marbled murrelets flying by, no recording of their calls--just the memory of their flight and the echo of their call to treasure.

Thanks to Paul Engelmeyer, Kim Nelson, the Audubon Society of Portland, and many others for all the work over so many day, months, and years, to make such an experience of a wild bird and a wild forest possible.