Coastal Lowlands

Elegant Terns are on Tillamook Bay this week. Twenty-nine were counted on the bay on September 6, and observers have kept reporting them in the days since. For a bird that nests almost entirely on one small island in the Gulf of California, the northern Oregon coast is a long way from home, and September is exactly when the species gets here. The Elegant Tern (Thalasseus elegans) is the smallest of the three crested, orange-billed terns that show up on this coast, and the easiest way to pick one out is to stand it next to the others. Caspian Terns, the big ones that have been rasping over the bay all summer, carry a heavy blood-orange bill and show mostly dark undersides to the outer wing. Royal Terns sit in between in size and bill weight. An Elegant Tern is slim and long-winged, with a thin yellow-orange bill that droops a little at the tip, a shaggy black crest that by fall has pulled back to leave the forehead white, a deeply forked tail, and pale underwings tipped in black. On a tideflat the Elegants tend to stand in their own tight knot a short distance from the Caspians rather than mixing in. In the air they flutter on narrow wings and drop straight into the water after small fish. Those fish explain the whole story. Elegant Terns feed heavily on northern anchovy, and once the breeding season ends on Isla Rasa the birds scatter along the coast in both directions, following the schools. Each autumn a pulse of anchovy moves north up the California Current, and Brown Pelicans, Heermann's Gulls and Elegant Terns ride along behind it. How far north the terns push varies from year to year with where the fish are. Their movement tracks anchovy availability, which itself shifts with ocean conditions off Baja California. Brown Pelicans and Heermann's Gulls are on the bay this same week, the same company the terns keep down south. Elegant Terns remain an uncommon enough visitor here that the reports were flagged when they came in. The place to look is the sandbars and tideflats at low tide, where the flock loafs between feeding runs, and the channels and nearshore surf where single birds hover and plunge. A slender, drooping bill and a nearly white underwing are the two marks that settle it.

A year makes a striking difference along the Coastal Lowlands of Tillamook County. In the first week of August 2025, the entire watershed here was rated abnormally dry or worse, with nearly all of it deep in severe drought. This same week in 2026, none of the county sits in moderate, severe, extreme, or exceptional drought, and only about a third remains even at the mildest abnormally dry tier. That share has held steady for seven weeks running after climbing through June, which reads less like a temporary reprieve than a settled recovery. On the Wilson, Trask, and Nestucca Rivers, gauges are reading at the low end of their past 90-day range for both water level and flow, with water temperatures around 20°C. Taken alone, that looks like stress. But for a county no longer under drought designation, this is simply the ordinary late-summer ebb these coastal rivers go through every year, as the pulse of snowmelt and spring rain fades into the dry months before autumn storms return. The recovery doesn't erase the older water quality picture, though. The Trask and Wilson are still listed as impaired under the Clean Water Act, a designation that predates this year's rainfall and hasn't shifted with it. Compliance among the county's permitted dischargers, mostly dairy operations, remains low-level: a handful of facilities carry recent violations and modest penalties, none serious enough to be flagged for significant non-compliance. The drought is easing considerably across this stretch of the Coast Range, but the questions about what's still moving through these rivers haven't gone anywhere.