Please confirm, comment, suggest any other birds that might be in this area.
Thanks!

4th of July Mtn Trail, a SW facing slope (plants mentioned to help you
help us with the birds). We hiked from trailhead at 2300 ft to about
4800 ft. First half mile damp with willows, sitka alder, Douglas maple,
quaking aspen, saskatoon berry, thimbleberry, etc. Higher up open forest
almost exclusively douglas fir and ponderosa pine. Low vegetation mostly
grasses, in places snowbrush. Other low growing plants - balsamroot,
collomia, lupine, buckwheats, penstemmons, phacelias, oyster plants.

The slope was so steep we could stand on the trail and look straight
across at the tops of nearby tall trees. My husband, who is hearing,
could hardly hike for the multitude of birdsongs. I and my brother
could see them darting everywhere. Very difficult to catch them with
our puny binoculars. We finally got a good look at red breasted
nuthatches, the female feeding a fledgling perched on a high branch
(near the trunk) of a doug fir. She seemed to get food from the cones.
We saw finch pairs - bright red male with an even brighter fluffy
crest (Cassin's finch or purple finch?). I vaguely remember a tweeters
posting about color variability in finches. Do they eat the fir cones
also? Generally there were more birds in the firs than in the pines.
Some yellow birds too, a probably warbler, flew right in front of me,
a flash of black and yellow (Townsend's warbler?). Sparrows flitted
about close to the ground and seemed to like balsamroot. They perched
and bounced on the flower (now seed) stalks, pecked at something on
the stalks, not seeds. I checked a few stalks and saw a few bugs
and spider I could not identify. I wonder if they "enjoyed" the
bouncing (do birds have fun?). Sparrows very light colored with
streaked breast, plain looking heads.

My husband saw a myster bird he described as robin sized, black capped
with white eyestripe, gray cheeks, orange breast. Sounds like the
male nuthatch except for the size. Maybe he misjudged or it's a
Kareem of the bird world.

One morning we saw a duck flailing in the rapids Icicle Creek at Johnny
Creek campground. She? would get behind a rock and peck at something
underwater, then move upstream (in the water). We decided it was
a Harlequin - white spot at the back of its head, gray cheek and a small
whitish dab above the eye and perpendicular to it. It looked a bit
more like the Nat Geogr book drawing than the one in Peterson's.

Walking near Icicle Creek from the Chatter Creek Campground to Rock
Island CG my husband saw a Hammonds flycatcher. As I lay on my back
resting, looking up through the trees, a hummingbird (couldn't identify
it) "attacked" the low branch of a hemlock, tugged and tugged and
finally flew off. Was it after insects? I saw a spotted sandpiper?
on the shore of Icicle Creek. It groomed itself on a rock and bounced
a little.

Emily Mandelbaum
Seattle
MCI Mail
MCI ID: 499-9429