Doc,

The Geo guide & the new Peterson are better. The complete absence of
Common Terns on the west coast was one of the more outrageous errors of
the Golden Guide. They are, of course, common fall migrants here and
occasional in spring. Caspians are relatively recent arrivals as
breeders but have had a colony in the thousands in Grays Harbor for
several decades and now a rapidly expanding colony at Everett (and
perhaps smaller groups nesting near Anacortes). This spring a fairly
large group seem to be prospecting at Kennydale on the se shoreline of
Lake Washington, which could be King County's first in a year or two.
They now nest in SE Alaska, I believe, and are threatening near Vancouver
BC. There are 2-3 pairs of Arctic Terns nesting at Everett, where they
have been for 10+ years now.

Gene Hunn (hunn at u.washington.edu)


On Thu, 28 Jul 1994, doc wrote:

> 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
>