Subject: bird sightings
Date: Mar 16 14:19:00 1999
From: Dennis Paulson - dpaulson at ups.edu


Hello tweeters,

I wanted to report a few sightings for the record, birds that you can look
for yourselves!

On Sunday, 14 March, in early afternoon, Jackie Sones, Jeremiah Trimble,
and I saw 2 BLACK OYSTERCATCHERS fly south past the Edmonds ferry landing,
much to my surprise. They're probably in King County by now.

Later that afternoon (ca 16:00 hrs) we saw a single TURKEY VULTURE heading
north along the ridge behind Golden Gardens Park in Seattle.

On 15 March, the same group of people had the flabbergasting experience of
finding about *50* male EURASIAN WIGEONS in a single flock of about 250
American Wigeons just south of where the Samish Island road hits Samish
Island in Skagit County. We counted up to 47 males in numerous scans, but
I'm sure we missed some, as many birds were obscured. There were at least
3 females, and surely more, as they were much harder to pick out.

Just a half mile south of that flock was another much closer flock of about
50 Americans that included a lovely female and 6 male Eurasians. Thus we
saw about 60 Eurasians in flocks that included about 300 Americans, an
absolutely amazing ratio. I have never seen numbers of Eurasians like this
in 31 years of birding here (my record previously was 14 males in a very
large flock of Americans, perhaps 1,000 birds), and I can't imagine why so
many were together in one place. Are they coming from all over the area
and staging on the Samish Flats?

I had to assure my friends from Massachusetts that this was not the normal
situation!

We met two gentlemen who had seen a Gyrfalcon and a Mountain Bluebird south
of the T junction, but we couldn't find those birds. Our wigeon experience
left us immune to disappointment, however.

Good birding!

Dennis

Dennis Paulson, Director phone 253-756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 253-756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416
http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html