Went up to Victoria yesterday to attend the Western Sandpiper Workshop as the
sole "Grays Harbor Representative". Not a great deal to seen in the rain,
however I did come across:

2 kittiwakes
14 brant
1 sooty shearwater
2 Heermann's gulls
few dozen common murres
few dozen Bonaparte's gulls

eh, that's it.

One part that might be of interest to tweeters, since they can help out, is
the timing of migration for a lot of shorebird species. The Canadian weather
people have a program which runs on their supercomputers which tracks airflow
on a global basis. Thje program was developed with incidents like Chernobyl in
mind to predict where clouds of dangerous chemicals / radiation etc might end
up. Anyway there is a severe lack of observations which might accurately
pin-point when western sandpipers are migrating along the Pacific coast. If
more data was gathered then the numbers could be plugged into the program to
work out what weather conditions the birds are exploiting - particularly what
heights they might be flying at and what the energy costs in doing so are.

This applies to more or less all the other species using the Pacific flyway as well.

So what are you waiting for !!!!!!

Stuart
--
Stuart MacKay, Ravenna Ave NE, Seattle, WA 98105