Dear Tweeters:

We spent a long weekend exploring the birds of the coast from Seaside to
Raymond, and based in Astoria, Oregon. We enjoyed the best birding day
on Saturday in Seaside and closed a gapping whole in our lifelist: black
scoter. Also enjoyed seeing three kinds of grebes, other scoters,
sandpipers, dunlin, varied thrushes, spotted towhee, hermit thrushes,
and lots more -- about 40 species total.

We also put in some serious hours of gull study. We wanted to get more
comfortable with things like bill and head shape, and leg, eye, mantle,
and primaries colors, etc. All in all, I think we spent about 7 hours
picking though every adult in every flock we saw, before giving the
younger gulls a glance, too. We even fed bread a couple of times to
bring them in close. The best spots were at big piles of fresh oyster
shells. We were kind of disappointed that we only found three species
to practice on -- ring-billed, glaucous-winged, and herring. We were
hoping we'd see something obviously "different" to try our fledgling
skills on, like common or Thayers. I'm pretty sure we saw some Westerns,
but none in a suitable study setting.

It was great to get out and concentrate on just birding for several
days, just the two of us. Well, okay, it wasn't all birding: we went to
"Titanic" in Astoria.

Kristi and Tom Streiffert
Coulee Dam, WA