Oregon Part 2: East of the West
After my adventures on the Oregon coast, I decided to head inland to explore some of central and eastern Oregon. The West is biogeographically diverse enough that there are some birds in the central valley that are very uncommon on the coast, and some birds east of the Cascades that are barely found west of there. Plus I just wanted to spend some time in some proper mountains. My first stop after driving over the Coast Range from Newport was at the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge , located in a nice patch of prairie in the Willamette Valley. I stopped at the appropriately-named Prairie Overlook there, where the first bird I was greeted by was a Northern Harrier soaring low over the grass and freaking out the ducks. The next one was one of my main targets: a very distant White-tailed Kite , this one a vagrant from further south that had been hanging around for the past few weeks. It's an incredibly beautiful bird like all Elanus kites, although it was very di...