Forever on Our Mind: Beautiful Benches of Oregon, Part II
The latest in a series of tributes to Oregon's beautiful benches takes me to the Klamath Basin
103. Beautiful Benches of Oregon, Part II
Note: One of my favorite things about hiking is taking a break from hiking—whether to drink some water, admire the view, or rest my “barking dogs” (as my grandmother liked to say). With years of occasionally not hiking under my belt, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for a well-placed bench along the trail. This is the latest in a series of pieces that pay tribute to the most beautiful benches in Oregon.
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June 2025:
Whenever we’re in nature, my buddy Adam and I delight in pointing out how damn literal bird names tend to be. That black bird with red wings? It is, shockingly, the red-winged blackbird. The black-headed grosbeak? You’ll never guess what color its head is. Then there’s the yellow warbler, which is actually an almost incandescent shade of green. (Just kidding. It’s every bit as yellow as you think.)
If a bird isn’t named as literally as possible, it seems to have been given its moniker by an ornithologist who grew up giggling along to Beavis & Butthead’s antics on MTV. For proof, look no further than the juniper titmouse—one of a whopping 55 species of titmice around the world.
On a recent June afternoon, it was tough not to snicker in amusement while my Merlin Bird ID app recognized many of the aforementioned fowl at the Wood River Wetland in Southern Oregon.
The wetland sits along the Pacific Flyway, a migratory bird route that spans Alaska and Argentina. Every year, millions of birds rest, nest, and feed in the Klamath Basin’s wide range of ecosystems—making this onetime cow pasture ground zero for some of Oregon’s best birding today.
I’d always understood that a lot of birds flew through—but had never considered what that looked, sounded, or felt like until getting a few steps from my car. Almost instantly, I realized how loud nature could be—how many birds chirped, chittered, chattered, sang, tweeted, cawed, called, warbled, whistled, and trilled while darting between leafy poplar trees and hiding out in grasses at the edge of Agency Lake.
I wasn’t gazing at far-off mountaintops that had weathered storms for millennia or old-growth trees that had stood for centuries; instead, the world was actively happening around me—dashing into bushes, clattering from tree branches, and dancing like fireworks through the blue skies above.
It all felt so alive. So immediate. So visceral.
Where the poplar trees thinned out and views opened up, I planted myself on a concrete bench overlooking a marshy corner of Agency Lake—itself the northern arm of Upper Klamath Lake, the largest freshwater reservoir west of the Rocky Mountains.
There, my phone’s Merlin app lit up like a slot machine while identifying the birdsong that filled the air. Within minutes, it found the American goldfinch, Nashville warbler, red-winged blackbird, and a handful of other, mostly hidden species I only occasionally glimpsed from my perch.
The birds moved almost too fast for me to keep up while peering into clumps of khaki-colored grasses and scanning the surrounding poplar trees. Occasionally, blue and black blurs glided above the water’s glassy surface or, for a split second, twirled into the treetops and out of sight. One bird disappeared into the marshland, only for another to launch like a rocket a few inches away.
Eventually, a distant buzzing grew louder and more ominous the closer it got—a buzzing that my app did not identify. Was it a colony of bees? A bicycle picking up speed on the path behind me?
It was not. Blending into the mess of birds was a drone hovering 20 or 30 feet overhead. The wetland’s residents seemed indifferent to the invasion, but it was a record scratch in their hypnotic siren song. The closer it got, the more it drowned out the chorus I’d come to hear—so I peeled myself off the bench and started walking back to the car. One last glance revealed that Merlin had identified 11 individual species on my half-mile walk so far.
The yellow warbler, black-headed grosbeak, and other perfectly named birds resumed their beautiful song, just for me, the further I drifted into nature.
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