We drove to Ridgefield, Washington, today to attend BirdFest and Bluegrass. We always take the back road in so that I can check on this poor old house. It looked pretty bad today.

There were lots of vendors there, many of them youngsters from about eight years old (with their moms helping) to teenagers. All of them were so enthusiastic and friendly, and we bought a few things to encourage them.

After leaving downtown, we headed out to the refuge.

It was a glorious day, about 72°, and so beautiful! This is the bridge heading into the refuge.

Nolemana thought I’d grabbed the camera and I thought he did, so all we had was my phone to take photos with. It doesn’t do major zooms very well. But we did spot this Great Blue Heron.

And this blurry duck.

Everything was so dry! The winter rains hadn’t arrived yet; usually this area is full of water.

But it was pretty in the wooded areas. We didn’t see any wildlife at all because everything was so dry.

There was algae in the river, which wasn’t moving at all.

I used the Merlin app to figure out which birds we heard, but sadly they were only these ones.

I loved seeing these spider (?) webs.

We were almost to the end of the drive, and this was the first fairly clean water we’d seen. But alas, there were no ducks or geese to be seen.

Yay! An Egret! I managed to get a couple of fairly good photos of him.

This area isn’t usually wet and we often see geese and herons here, but not today. Maybe they were all napping.

We got a better photo of the boat as we left.

And the daily pīpī photo was pretty bad.