Michael Price wrote:

>What I'm trying to figure out is why shorebirds sometimes appear more or
>less simultaneously along the Pacific Coast from Cascadia to California (I
>say, that has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? "From Cascadia to California",
>like the title of a National Geographic article of the 1950's), and it seems
>that two possibilities are, first, that a big bunch set out from the north,
>some drop out sequentially at various sites along the coast and the
>strongest keep flying until they reach Al's region or further in a day or
>two of sustained flight or, second, that they again leave en masse after
>staging but use assisting winds associated with Pacific weather systems,
>coming ashore wherever these systems do.

Maybe Al's early yellowlegs was just an anomaly, like the 12 July
Semipalmated Sandpiper that I've mentioned. Seeing a single bird probably
shouldn't imply that *populations or flocks* are appearing simultaneously
from C to shining C. When I was doing the research for my shorebird book,
I concluced that arrival times of both adults and juveniles in California
were later than those from Cascadia. I can see, however, that I definitely
missed the boat in not finding out about this wonderful arrival-date data
set from Vancouver, better than anything I had from Washington.

Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416