My wife and I saw a nicely-plumaged Caspian Tern last weekend
up on Whidbey Island; it was an easy id and no great surprise
to us until we looked in our Golden guide (yeah, yeah, I know)
to see that ALL the tern range maps ended well south of Washington.

My questions are these:

o what's the REAL range for terns around here? Are Caspians really
the only ones we might see?

o where can one find more reliable range maps? I think the data
on which the Golden maps are based are pretty old - in some
cases, pre-DDT ban, probably, which explains the ridiculously
small range for some of the raptors.

BTW, although we weren't up there for birding, we did pretty
well anyway....

Josh Hayes, Quantitative Sciences, U of W
josh at pogo.cqs.washington.edu