Ray Bruun Photography - Mouth of Cottonwood Creek Wildlife Area

Mouth-of-Cottonwood Creek Wildlife Area

Mouth-of-Cottonwood Creek Wildlife Area is currently my favorite place to find early odes in Shasta County. There is one pond in particular that is shallow (no more than hip deep) causing it to warm up early. The pond is about 1/3-mile north of Cottonwood Creek, 1.7 miles from its confluence with the Sacramento River. The lower reaches of Cottonwood Creek form the boundary between Shasta County, to the north, and Tehama County, to the south. The red "x" on the map below is the approximate location of the pond (I'll have to get the actual location and coordinates using a GPS).

Early Season

My first trip to the pond in 2005 was with my family, on Saturday, February 26. Finding something they like to do is key to family harmony and even more important (ahem), me getting out to photograph odes as often as possible. Mary, my wife, kept busy with her quilting and my son, Steven, and his friend, Marcus, played catch with a water-filled pepsi bottle, and when they got bored with that, bashed each other with cattails. Looking carefully as I walked around the pond, I was able to find four Pacific Forktails, three adult males and a young female, in addition to seven or eight adult Variegated Meadowhawks.

Two weeks later (12 March), after a spell of unusually warm weather (into the eighties), I returned to the pond with another local ode enthusiast, George Sappington (George has a web site devoted to odes and ode habitat in Redding, CA -- Creeks of Redding California, USA). The ode population had increased dramatically. There were hundreds of forktails, Pacific and Black-fronted, ranging in age from teneral to adult. A few were in wheel and ovipositing. We saw several adult male Bluets (Tule?) and one adult female. Variegated Meadowhawks were also present, but not abundant (2 adults and perhaps 20 tenerals were seen).

During the off-seaon, I had acquired a 1.4X teleconverter lens to go with the 180mm macro, which, in combination with the 1.6X crop factor of the Canon EOS 10D camera body, gives an equivalent 403mm lens. This seems to help in approaching the insects (not having to get as close) and in getting lower shot angles in difficult situations (e.g., when an ode is sitting on or near the water). The next big purchase will probably be the EOS 30D camera body (hopefully with a 12 megapixel sensor), when it comes out approximately a year to a year-and-a-half from now (a guess).

The following pictures were taken during these first two visits to the pond.