Oregon Coast

6FPS V7#10: October 13, 2025

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Fall arrived with our first significant rain in months, almost a full inch, and all of the plants here on the property says ‘thanks’, but it’s just a start. The weather has definitely turned cool and grey, which I like, and we had our first evening with the stove on October 3 (about normal).

The Cubs and the Mariners are both in the playoffs, and so the baseball season continues. Hockey season has just begun, and we’re looking forward to that as well — with hopes that the Sharks will show some progress in the rebuild, and that the Kraken improve as well.

Listers

There’s been a short film that’s gone quite viral through the birding community recently, and seems to be turning into a real phenomenon even outside the birding world.

Listers, available to view for free on YouTube, tells the story of a couple of brothers who got curious about birding, and decided to explore it by going on a Big Year — which is where you try to see as many species as you can in one year.

This is, by the way, kind of an insane way to introduce yourself to birding, soft of like getting interested in jogging and getting started by running a marathon. I have never had any interest in a big year, and I can’t see any reason to consider one, because it’s one long, crazy grind — but there are folks who love doing it because they like the challenge, and more power to them.

These two bought a van and spent a year driving the country — 30,000 miles travelled — chasing birds to add to their list. This is a funny, honest and interesting look into this competitive aspect of birding, and it strikes the right balance between exulting in the birds and showing us the grind and grunt that goes with an endeavor of this form.

It’s highly recommended as a watch, and will probably give those of you curious about birding and why I am so serious about it, even though my view of birding is a much more casual and overtly non-competitive style in my own birding. And if you’re curious, Audubon has a really nice interview with the two brothers.

100 Images in 100 Years

Santa Clara County Bird Alliance is celebrating its 100th birthday in October. Before moving to Washington a few years ago I put a lot of sweat equity into the organization, and I’m thrilled to see it thriving and celebrating itself next month. One of the things they did was solicit many of the photographers in the county for photos from the area to celebrate the birds seen there, and I’m glad to see a couple of mine have been included: https://www.smugmug.com/gallery/n-RGpzKZ

If you’re one of those folks who visits down there for work or pleasure (this county is the core center of Silicon Valley, home to Apple, Google, Intel and many others) it’s an incredible birding area with a large group of really good birders and photographers and is an area that’s had a strong commitment to open space and bird habitats. It’s well worth a birding trip if you haven’t considered it (I wish I could have gotten down there next month, but couldn’t make the details work). (It also is the place where that one day wonder Dark-Sided Flycatcher was found and photographed recently.

Also, one of Santa Clara Valley Bird Alliance’s activities is a blind auction of artwork and some other interesting items including a 17 volume set of the Handbook of Birds of the World, published 1992-2013 and with a minimum bid of $1200 (and I’m drooling). Lots of really nice artwork, including a couple of drawings by Mathhew Dodder, who also happens to be the executive director of SCVBA. I have my eye on at least three pieces. It’ll run for the next couple of weeks, and is well worth a browse (and a bid):

https://www.32auctions.com/SCVBA2025

(the books were donated by the family of Doug and Gail Cheeseman, who many birders may know from their long activity in birding and the expedition company they ran)

xOS26 first thoughts

It’s fall, and Apple has released the new Phones and the latest round of OS upgrades — now named to tie in with the year, so we’re now using IOS, iPadOS, MacOS and WatchOS 26.

On the hardware side I bought an Apple Watch and the new AirPods Pro 3, but no phone — happy with the iPhone 16 I got last year.

The watch upgrade was to allow me to use both a day watch and a night watch, so I could experiment with Apple’s sleep tracking without having to worry about keeping a single watch charged. When I go to bed, I put my older watch on and sleep with it and when I get up, I sleep on the new day watch, and overall, it just works, which is what I expected.

The AirPods I was hopeful for a better fit; I’ve talked in the past about the AirPods Pro 2 not fitting my ears well until I found a specific set of third party tips made of memory foam that worked pretty well. So far, I’m much happier with the fit of the Pro 3 earbuds, although I’m not willing yet to go jogging in them,.

The big thing about the xOS26 releases of the software is Liquid Glass, and of course, there’s been a lot of controversy about the release, partly because some folks get bent out of shape any time their cheese gets moved around, and partly because controversy is good for page views, which is good for advertising revenue, so of course, every release season there have to be controversies because it’s some site’s business model.

There are about a zillion reviews, overviews, tutorials and diatribes about these releases out there, and so I’m not going to do that and add to the noise. If you want some nice, balanced and well considered looks, head over to MacStories.

Instead, what I’m going to do is talk about what I’ve noticed in the weeks since upgrading all my gear, and point out things I really like, and problems I’ve run into.

My overall hot take: yes, Liquid Glass does make things different, but what I found is that overall, things didn’t really change, and it faded into the background almost immediately — in other words, if you’re worried that the re-designs and changes are going to mess you and your workflows up, as far as I can tell, that’s a big non-issue.

Overall, all of my devices work the same way they did on previous releases, and the visual changes range from “I don’t really notice anything” to “hey, that’s pretty good”. Two specific changes I find I really like: the transparent menu bar on MacOS looks quite nice to me, and there was some really good work done on improving the look of CarPlay, and when driving around I find things look and act much much better. Text is now really crisp and readable and the CarPlay maps App is a big step forward.

I will note that one huge technology upgrade — the iPad windowing system redesign — I’ve turned off for now, not because I don’t like it but because I rarely use my iPad that way these days and I haven’t wanted to spend the couple of hours I need to learn how to use it properly. That’s not a criticism of the changes, just a recognition that I need to play with it a bit and I haven’t wanted to put in that time yet. But overall, even if you don’t turn it off, I never ran into a situation where it did something that had me in “okay, now how do I fix this?” mode. It seems pretty good, but it’s capability I’m not really going to use right now, so I’ve delayed my trying to sort it out.

Negatives? Things have been surprisingly stable and it’s hard to find significant issues. One IOS App — Airmail — has been a bit funky for me, it seems to be slow in displaying content and responding to clicks and drags, and it’s showing clear signs of some kind of memory leak as it slows down over time as I use it. This feels like a specific application problem, not an OS problem, since I’m not seeing signs of this in any other apps, and probably are things introduced as they built in Liquid Glass look and feel this summer. I do expect it’ll get fixed at some point.

On MacOS, my Mac Studio at one point stopped responding to network access, and when I went and looked, it told me it was completely out of application memory, to the point I had to hard reset the thing, power cycle it and reboot. And since then it’s been fine.

The one thing I do with that machine that I don’t do with the laptop is log into it remotely via Screen Sharing from the laptop upstairs, and that makes me wonder if there’s a memory leak somewhere in the back end of Screen Sharing, but since it’s only happened once, that’s pure speculation.

Beyond those two issues — everything just works. So if you’ve been paying attention to al of the screaming and yelling about how Apple moved the cheese with these updates and so the world is ending (and please click onto our site for all the details about the pending failure of Apple because of this, and read our ads!) my advice is: relax. Upgrade. And you’ll probably find all the noise about this update is just that: noise.

As usual, 90% of the screaming and yelling about Apple I more about people wanting to be heard and not really about Apple doing something bad.

These new releases have proven to me to be clean, solid and reliable — and there’s nothing about them to worry about if you haven’t upgraded yet.

Wildlife Update

After a month away, we had mama bear and her two growing cubs wander through, and along the way, pull down a branch to get at some of the fruit ripening in the orchard (sigh). I need to go clean up that mess. No pigs this month, though. The deer have been hanging around on a regular basis and seem quite comfortable at this point — I can walk around outside and they watch, but they don’t try to leave as long as I keep a bit of distance. The one crazy thing that happened this month was when we had the mom deer and her two foals (now out of there white spots and getting close to adult size) hanging out when they suddenly all went into full alert — and then we saw the coyote. And so did mom. The kid booked into the woods, and mom put on the afterburner and went right for the coyote at warp speed. The coyote had one short “what the HELL?” moment and then sprinted it’s way up the driveway and out of sight, with a pretty pissed off deer right on its butt. A minute or so later, mom came back down the driveway — prancing — and went to join her kids.

And in case you were wondering how bad it would hurt to be kicked by a deer, I found the tracks where she kicked in the warp drive, and she dug into the ground a full three inches. Don’t get on the bad side of an angry deer, folks.

See you next issue!

  • Nothing this month (I know, I should be writing more)

In September I took my fall trip, which was a week out mostly on the Oregon Coast. This was intended to be mostly an unplug and relax trip, with birding as as secondary attraction — I carried the camera but didn’t really use it much. Right now, to be honest, any photography other than birds feels like work instead of fun, and I’m just letting it happen if I feel motivated and not feel guilty when I don’t.

Spending a week on the road is the longest trip I’ve taken since Covid and since I got the migraines/vertigo well controlled, and this trip was in some ways a test of how well I’d do. TL/DR, it all went really well and that gives me confidence for more and longer trips down the road.

I’ve been spending time on the coast going back to the 1990’s and I love the area; it’s a great region to explore and relax. I’ll typically focus my time around three places: Bandon in the South, Newport more or less in the middle, and Astoria on the North. Each town is interesting and has nice food and lodging options, and each gives me a base to explore a nice chunk of the coast. On this trip I poked around from Florence to the south all the way up to Tokeland to the north.

I left around noon on a Friday, with my first stop being Ridgefield, since I wanted to visit the refuge in early fall and see what was going on, and because I am still trying to avoid drives longer than about 4 hours. The first night’s stay was the Best Western in Woodland, which was a nice, quiet room.

I ended up doing the tour route twice, once after I checked into the room in the afternoon, and again early morning after checking out. Down in California, the Central Valley refuges tend to be winter-only places, and get very dry and slow during the summer, but Ridgefield is interesting to visit year round. On this trip, you could tell a lot of the summer birds had left but there was still enough going on to make it a fun stop: I had 21 species on the evening visit and 34 the next morning with 36 unique species across the two. Highlights included some nice Wood Ducks and a hooting Great Horned Owl, but the best bird by far was a single Bank Swallow I found in a flock of Barn Swallows with an assist from Merlin — a lifer.

After that stop, it was on the road through Portland and into Newport, where I stayed two nights. Our favorite stay in Newport is the Agate Beach Motel, a small but really comfortable classic motor lodge very near Yaquina Point, but it was full, so I went instead with the Agate Beach Best Western — despite my preference for Best Western Hotels, the first time I’ve actually stayed there. I rather liked it, and a rarity for a Best Western, it has an in-house restaurant, which I tried and quite enjoyed. It’s right on the water, so the room and restaurant both had quite pleasant views.

Whenever I visit Newport, I make it a point to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which is a very nice, smallish facility — which at one point housed Keiko, a killer whale that was ultimately freed into the wild. The story of Keiko (star of the movie “Free Willy” is an interesting one worth digging into. These days the sea otters are the star attraction and they did not disappoint, but my favorite place is always the aviary (of course), home to Puffins, Murres and other seabirds. Laurie and I have been going to this aquarium long enough to have actually seen Keiko during the time it was housed there.

A big part of their exhibit space was dedicated to discussing the problems of plastic pollution in the oceans, and included a number of quite interesting and well done sculptures created from plastic waste.

This was, unfortunately, where I realized I’d been pushing my legs hard enough they had decided to push back, so most of my time was spent moving from bench to bench and sitting for a while to enjoy the exhibits and rest the legs for a bit, but the aquarium, as always, was well worth the visit, and if you’re thinking of going there, it’s a really nice, low key, half day exploration, so it’s not a huge time commitment, and it’s great for kids — when I was there, the place was quite busy and wonderfully noisy with many families, and I was very pleased to see how widely diverse the attendees were that day.

With my legs loudly requesting a day off (it actually took two for them to settle down), I adjusted my plans a bit and spent time driving around and exploring, getting down to Florence (about an hour drive south) and just poking around. I did some birding, both along the coast along the bay and jetties, but didn’t see anything too unusual. I would normally bird Yaquina Point (where the lighthouse is) but overall the birding was quiet and we were past the nesting season there (it’s a big rookery for cormorants and murres) and my legs suggested I skip it.

One restaurant to recommend in Newport is Super Oscars Mexican, a family run mostly taqueria place that has really tasty food — there are a number of good Mexican places in town, but this is my favorite to grab and go with, and I took a nice chicken quesadilla out to the Jetty and ate it while watching the Pelicans and Cormorants do their thing. And if you’re interested in some ice cream, head over to The Local Scoop, featuring both Tilamook and Umqua brands — I especially recommend the Umpqua River Wild Blackberry if they have it. And FWIW, the Tilamook flavors available local the main facility are a higher quality than is distributed nationally.

After a couple of nights in Newport, it was time to head north to my next stop, Astoria. Astoria has an interesting history, and is named after John Astor, and there is a really interesting story behind its founding. It sits right on the river near the mouth of the Columbia, and it is a great place stay to explore the Northern Oregon Coast and Southern Washington Coast — you can day trip up to Westport if you want.

I typically stay at the Best Western there, but when I went to look for it, the hotel wasn’t there. It turns out they moved, and took over what used to be a Choice Hotel, which is right on the river near downtown. The now former hotel is now a Lloyd hotel. This is, to me, a small upgrade, in that the previous version was okay but fairly generic and forgettable and not in a great location. It turns out when they took over the Choice hotel, they didn’t even change the furnishings — I had stayed in that Choice years ago on one trip, and I realized as I settled in that it was set up with the same couch and table as in my previous stay.

There’s also a Best Western in Seaside nearby, and I have been meaning to give it a try, but then upgrade price to a river view in Seaside was $20 a night, and a beach view in Seaside was $100 a night, and that made the choice easy. It’s a nice, comfortable hotel with nice views — but on this trip, I couldn’t exactly call it quiet, because a bachelor pod of Sea Lions has taken over a nearby pier — not that I minded but they noted some guests did.

Food recommendations in Astoria include the Astoria Brewing, also a great place for some nice beers, or in my case, a nice local cider. I must admit my burger was a bit dry, but in general, it’s good, solid pub food. Also I stopped at Mo’s, a coastal chain, for their chowder and a really nice fish&chips. And while I normally grab and go breakfast to get out and around while traveling, I always stop in once to Pig ’n/Pancake, another really nice coastal chain. Unfortunately, two places I used to love while staying here: Doogers seafood and Baked in Alaska, were both Covid casualties.

The trip from Newport to Astoria passes through Tilamook, home, of course, of Tilamook Cheese World Headquarters and its large and usually quite busy company store. It is well worth a stop — there’s a fun tour you can go through if you want, and the store is a good place to pick up things to make up lunches or a picnic or a nice quiet dinner back in the room. There are also some cheeses you can buy there that they don’t ship widely, including a rather nice extra sharp cheddar, but much of what is here you can buy in most groceries. The Tilamook store also has a large ice cream counter, and so this is a really good place to add calories to your life happily.

But very near to Tilamook is a smaller place called the Blue Heron.

It specializes in local and regional smaller offerings, and you can get a lot of really nice, small producer, artisanal cheeses, sausages and other yummies. This is a place I always stop at, and this time, I was able to grab a few nice goat cheeses and a nice piece of Vampire Cheddar from Facerock Creamery in Bandon, and so I had a nice supply of yummies for lunches the rest of the trip (and about a week after I got home). I don’t mind passing on visiting Tilamook, and on this trip the parking was completely full so I did, but Blue Heron is a must visit, and it never disappoints.

While exploring around Astoria, I spent time in Fort Stevens State Park, and a short visit to Cape Disappointment, where I found out much of the park is closed for construction, and I spent some time exploring and birding the Long Beach area, but the birding was slow and nothing much to talk about. My second day, since my legs were still grumping at me, I decided to take the drive up to Tokeland (about 90 minutes), where there has been a huge flock of Marbled Godwits hanging out in the Marina, and with them some local birding celebrities: two Bar-Tailed Godwits have been with the flock for weeks, as well as two Hudsonian Godwits.

So in search of these fare (for Washington) birds, I drove 90 minutes, parked at the marina, chatted with a couple of other birders there chasing these Godwits, and then walked over to the dock. Along the rocks on the shore of the marina was a huge flock (300+) of godwits, and much to my amusement, less than ten feet from where I was standing, were the two Bar-tailed godwits, waving and offering autographs.

That’s how chasing rarities goes some times: sometimes you drive for an hour or more only to find the bird disappeared ten minutes ago, and sometimes you do the drive and the birds show up five minutes later to be added to your life list.

That said, I spent another hour or so trying to find the Hudsonian Godwits, to no avail, but they have been seen much less reliably than these two extroverts. And after that, it was mostly just poking around and exploring, but nothing much worth discussing. On the last day, I got up, had an omelette and pancakes at Pig ‘N Pancake, and drove the 3 hours home, and honestly, I was ready for my own bed and comfy chair for a few days.

There was very little photography to speak of, mostly me taking quick shots with the iPhone rather than trying to be more serious about it. The birding was nice, better than I expected this time of year, and it was really nice to add two species to my life list (Bank Swallow and Bar-tailed Godwit, #313 and #314 respectively), which gives me a solid 5 lifers for the year. I added 7 species to my year list, leaving that at a nice 157 species compared to 132 for all of 2024.

Current thoughts are for a 2-2 day trip up into the Skagit region sometime in January or February for the Snow Geese and a couple of trips down to Ridgefield in the December-March time (both probably one night stays) for the winter birding there. Nothing else significant on the horizon at the moment, but every trip I take helps me feel more confident about taking these trips without the migraines and vertigo creating serious issues — and that makes me happy

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area.

I’ve gone out a few times but not a lot of production. On my week along the Oregon coast, I had the camera ready and prepped but with the exception of some shots of this Bar-Tailed Godwit in Tokeland, spent the week relaxing instead of stressing for compositions.

I have eight e-books available. All are free for you to download and read with no obligation. You can download them from my e-book page on the web site.

These are the books that are available:

  • Birding 101: Hints and Tips for the New Birder

  • Merced National Wildlife Refuge

  • And the Geese Exploded: A Life With Birds

  • Birds of Santa Clara County

  • 2021.1: A Year of Transitions

  • 2020.1: Images from the year when Covid changed everything

  • 2019 (1)

  • 2019 (2)

Free Wallpapers just for Subscribers

New Wallpapers (August, 2025). A new set of 12 wallpapers are now available.

You can download this new set from the 6FPS Secret Wallpaper. The previous set of wallpapers are now with the full public set at Public Wallpaper page.

These are available only to you, my favorite people who happen to be subscribers to 6FPS. The previous set of images I released here are now available to the general public.

This is a small gift to you to thank you for being a subscriber. You are welcome to use any or all of them if you wish, but please: don't share the private hangout link with others, encourage them to subscribe via https://www.chuq.me/6fps instead. Thanks.

And with that, see you next issue!

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com). 6FPS is Copyright © 2025 by Chuq Von Rospach. All Rights Reserved.

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.

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And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.