On December 5th Jerry Tangren wrote:

>Only the FOURTH?

>Or fourth with decent documentation? Seems that we hear of
>one somewhere almost every year? I forget who, but someone even
>suggested CCLS were regular migrants through Eaern Washington
>in Spring!

While I don't know the exact status of all it's documented occur-
ences in WA his comments bring up an interesting point. Do the
accepted records detemine the bird's "true" status in the state
or not? While perhaps more CCLS's have been reported than have
run the gauntlet of official acceptance we still have to be
cautious of accepting any old rport that comes through the grape-
vine and citing these reports as evidence of the birds status
in our state (or County, etc.) I'm reminded of a thread that ran
on Tweeters several months ago about White-tailed Kite in ng
County. One of the participants mentioned as support for their
possible sighting the earlier "sighting" of this bird in Kent
several months previous. The Kent sighting was reported 2nd
hand and when I did a little checking around later I discovered
that the bird was seen by someone who saw it pass overhead while
driving. The person saw it through the sunroof of their car and
then went to work and looked it up matching what they saw with
the Kite. I then spoke with this person and found out that
she had seen the same bird several times since. The area, just
N. and E. of the Kent Ponds hosts a couple of nesting pairs of
Harriers and is heavily birded. I suspect that if a Kite had
passed the summer here it would've been noticed by others.
Because this report wound through the grapevine without much
scrutiny it became part of the unofficial record that we refer
to when discussing bird ranges. With the details of the Kite's
sighting being almost nonexistent I doubt it would have been
accepted as a 1st or 2nd county record. Do I know for sure
that it wasn't a Kite? Of course not. This doesn't mean either
that the birds at Marymoor Park discussed this summer weren't
Kites either or that they never occur in King County; I'm
sure they will be well documented someday soon as they have
been seen by many experienced observers in Pierce County lately.
I guess my long-winded point is caution in stating bird occur-
ences based on hearsay. The CCLS will also probably be found
with increasing frequency in coming years (just a guess).
Until such time as 20-50, or some other arbitrary number of
well documented reports have been accepted we shouldn't
accept undocumented or sketchily documented records as
evidence of "true" status.