Hi Tweeters

Spent part of the day birding at the Portage Wildlife Sanctuary, Boe
Road in the Stillaguamish floodplain, and Tulalip Bay. Hadn't been to
Portage before but was very happy to find another interesting natural
area to bird in Snohomish County. Portage Creek is a tributary to the
Stillaguamish River, and the sanctuary is along the Stilly floodplain.
We visited with the resident caretaker, Gene Ammon, who is a full time
employee of Snohomish County Parks. A good portion of the sanctuary was
floodplain farmland with drainageways and streams running through the
area interspersed with some shrubs and wetlands. The fields are
bordered to the south by a small forest and shrubs and a pond. The
santuary lies at the base of a steep bluff. Of course, Portage Creek
runs through the sanctuary.

Another observer recently reported a rough-legged hawk there, and we saw
the hawk as well. It was an interesting sighting for us as we usually
see the light phase, and this was a beautiful dark phase bird. On the
floodplain fields we saw five western meadowlarks, two common snipes, an
American kestrel, northern harrier, red-tailed hawk, marsh wren,
killdeer, crows, and great blue heron. The shrubs offered some inviting
squeaks, but the best we could find were song sparrows. I have a
feeling that those of you who are good at finding winter sparrows would
have some good luck here. There were two pied-billed grebes and several
mallards in the pond and black-capped chickadees, ruby-crowned kinglets,
robins, dark-eyed juncos, five common flickers, spotted towhees,
Stellar's jay, and red-winged blackbirds in the trees and shrubs around
the sanctuary. We also saw a coho salmon in the creek. We had a very
pleasant stay.

>From Portage Creek we headed to the Boe Road and saw an estimated 4000
snow geese. In addition to the geese, there were lots of blackbirds, a
great blue heron, and four bald eagles.

We headed back to Everett intending to stop for a few minutes at Kayak
Point County Park, but found that you now have to pay $3.00 to enter and
since we planned only a short visit decided to keep going. We stopped
at several areas along Tulalip Bay - saw common loon, surf scoters,
western and horned grebes, sea lions, cormorants, bufflehead, belted
kingfisher, and we watched a adult bald eagle carry a western grebe to a
piling and eat it. We didn't see the kill, but saw the eagle plucking
the bird and then with the grebe's head and neck hanging down the side
of the piling we watched the eagle tear into the grebe with another
adult eagle watching on a nearby piling. We left before the eagle
finished the grebe, but doubt there was going to be anything left for
the other eagle.

There are lots of nets in the bay to catch the returning salmon. Have
had some bad experiences with the gillnets in the Snohomish River
estuary area catching diving birds, including loons, grebes, and
cormorants, in addition to salmon.

But - it was a good day!

Janet
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Janet Carroll
Everett WA
jrc at jrc.seanet.com
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"The frog never drinks up the pond in which it lives."
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