Following on this dismal report, were ANY Upland Sandpipers found this
year in Oregon - traditional haunts or other? I looked at the Izee Rd.
spot in late June w/o success, and remember Skip Russell noting none in
the other Grant Co. traditional spot (Bear Valley?)

Tom Love 45N, 123W
Dept. Soc/Anth
Linfield College
McMinnville OR 97128
tlove at linfield.edu

On Fri, 18 Aug 1995, M. Smith wrote:

> Something to think about (assuming you don't have any work to do!!):
>
> I've also been doing some Upland Sandpipier research, and (thanks to Kelly
> McAllister) came across the summary of sightings in Washington. I put the
> data into Excel, totals by year, and graphed them. This interesting plot
> shows a fluctuating population from 1-12 individuals from 1954 - 1988,
> around a mean of about 4 birds/year (disclaimer: the data are probably
> not suitable for any real statistical analyses). The numbers did not
> include eggs/hatchlings or westside migrants, I tried to plot numbers of
> birds that could be breeding. Now this doesn't look like a huge
> population, but it seemed to be stable for that 35 year interval (prior to
> 1954, annual data were not available and probably not indicative overall
> numbers). What happened between summer 1988 and summer 1989 to cause such
> a decline? Prior to this, were conditions elsewhere poor, causing
> increased numbers here during previous years, and then an exodus when
> conditions elsewhere improved (the Washington is only peripheral
> hypothesis)? Or was a tremendous mall built that year on a nice spot (the
> kill the last good spot hypothesis)? It really seems to be a sudden crash
> (from 10 in 1988 to 3 in 1989-91 to 2 in 1992-93 to none in 1994-95).
>
> -------------
> Michael R. Smith
> Univ. of Washington, Seattle
> whimbrel at u.washington.edu
> http://salmo.cqs.washington.edu/~wagap/mike.html
>
>