Subject: Discovery Park report
Date: Nov 6 08:53:48 1995
From: Mike Patrick - mike at violin1.radonc.washington.edu


Tweeters,

I was fortunate enough to have time to spend all of Sunday morning at Discovery
Park (in Seattle).

The highlights:
3 Bald Eagles soaring above the bluff, one immature
1 Northern Goshawk - (immature) I saw the eyebrow stripe quite clearly, but
doubters are welcome to second-guess me

It was fun watching the accipter fly from one group of trees to another (it
appeared like a hungry kid rushing about, not having the patience to sneak
up on anything) and the eruption of robins and starlings from these trees
made me realize how many birds I *don't* see.

The crows escorting the eagles were quite bold with the immature. I watched
them pluck at the tail and primary feathers. One crow actually flew around
under the immature for a few seconds, apparently realized it's fool-hardiness
and went into a steep dive for about 100'.

In the woods, the usual suspects; lots of kinglets, bushtits, a downey and
pileated woodpecker, several red-shafted flickers, dark-eyed juncos, winter
wrens, black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees, and a brown creeper.
Those pileated's can sure make progress on a snag! With just a few blows, this
one knocked off big junks of bark; in a short while it exposed a patch of
rotting wood about 3"x5", then poked a small hole off to one side and started
licking up termintes...maybe driving them off into one small area?

Off the beach were white-winged scoters, surf scoters, horned and western
grebes (a big group, ~100, of the latter on the north side of West Point),
actively feeding common mergansers (watching them makes you ecstatic you're
not a small fish), Barrow's golden-eyes, mew gulls outnumbering the
glaucous-winged gulls (one gulping down whole, live, crabs - now there's one
tough stomach).

The Stuart report: 12 Sanderling feeding on seaweed encrusted small rocks and
the few patches of exposed sand on the south side of West Point.

Hope this is interesting (and not too on topic ;-).

--
Michael Patrick - Staff Engineer
University of Washington, Radiation Oncology, Box 356043
1959 NE Pacific St.
Seattle, WA. 98195
mike at radonc.washington.edu
(206) 548-4536