Many Puget Sound beachgoers pass pigeon guillemot burrows without knowing it. The birds are dark and pigeon-sized, with a white wing patch, a red-lined mouth and, in flight, flaming red feet.
Author Maria Mudd Ruth presents “The Bird with Flaming Red Feet” at the Redmond Public Library.
Author Maria Mudd Ruth wants them noticed. Puffins, she told Eastside Audubon’s Program Night audience at the Redmond Public Library on Wednesday, October 21, “get all the limelight.” But “the ones hidden in plain sight, like the pigeon guillemot, I believe deserve a little share of that limelight.”
Ms. Ruth, an Olympia author, has volunteered with the Salish Sea Guillemot Network since 2013, spending one hour a week each summer at a colony on Eld Inlet. Her new book, "The Bird with Flaming Red Feet," came out in April from Mountaineers Books.
Few people have seen a guillemot chick’s first flight. Published accounts described fledglings walking or flying clumsily to the water. One August night, a team member watched a chick fly over a long stretch of beach and land on the water.
"What a privilege it is," Ms. Ruth said, "to have in our lives a wild bird that … is still able to be its wild self out on the water."
"The Bird with Flaming Red Feet" is available from Mountaineers Books.