Subject: Re: San Juan trip birds
Date: Jun 15 10:52:35 1995
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at ups.edu


>Hi Tweeters! i just got back from a 3-day boat trip to eastern San juan islands
>with stops to look at rocks on several. Many Rhinos and marbled murrelets,
>latte
>r with young birds. Most surprising were many singing Fox Sparrows on Sucia.
>Clark Blake Dept. of Geology, WWU, Bellingham.

The Fox Sparrows are exciting. The only place Fox Sparrows were known to
breed in the western WA lowlands recently, to my knowledge, was around Cape
Flattery, a population of _Passerella iliaca fuliginosa_, which breeds from
there north to southeastern Alaska in the coastal lowlands. Breeding has
been reported from both Tatoosh and Destruction islands, but birds seem
very local on the mainland. Successional changes probably affect this
species a lot.

Dawson and Bowles (1909) listed Fox Sparrows as breeding in the San Juan
Islands, and the 1957 AOU check-list listed Lopez Island. Jewett et al.,
in Birds of Washington (1953), mention but do not confirm the Dawson &
Bowles records from the San Juans, and Lewis and Sharpe, in their Birding
in the San Juan Islands (1987), give them no credence. They do say that
Fox Sparrows breed on Mandarte Island, east of Sidney, a fair piece from
Sucia but a lot closer than Cape Flattery.

BC birders, do Fox Sparrows breed elsewhere on the S tip of Vancouver
Island or in the Gulf Islands?

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