72 Microseasons of the Pacific Northwest

By late December, the Willamette Valley, lower Columbia floodplain, and Puget Sound bottomlands hold their peak concentrations of wintering waterfowl. Trumpeter swans (Cygnus buccinator) — the world's largest wild waterfowl, with wingspans approaching 8 feet — winter in the Pacific Northwest in numbers that would have been unimaginable fifty years ago. Once hunted nearly to extinction, trumpeter swans have recovered to a wintering population of several thousand in western Washington and Oregon. Their low, resonant bugling call — a deep, horn-like sound quite different from the tundra swan's higher voice — carries across flooded fields on cold mornings. Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on the Columbia River floodplain holds some of the highest concentrations: counts of 40,000 ducks and 45,000 geese have been recorded, with mixed flocks of trumpeter and tundra swans wading the shallow impoundments. Skagit Valley farmlands between Mount Vernon and La Conner hold large swan flocks visible from Highway 20. The Samish Flats and Padilla Bay shoreline are also excellent. In the Willamette Valley, Baskett Slough and Ankeny National Wildlife Refuges hold the largest remaining wintering populations of dusky Canada geese, a subspecies that nests exclusively on Alaska's Copper River Delta and winters almost entirely in the Willamette Valley. Driving the rural roads of the Skagit flats on a clear December morning, with frost on the stubble fields and hundreds of white swans standing in flooded furrows under a pale winter sky, is one of the most distinctly Pacific Northwest winter experiences available to anyone.