hello tweets.

i'm baaaack! i went to the montlake fill for a visit that ended up
being far more brief than i wished it to be. about ten minutes
after i arrived, the air suddenly was filled with an angrily buzzing
crowd of helicopters that circled slowly over the central campus and
the montlake fill. of course, all the birds decided to hide.

before this technological annoyance filled the air with noise, i
did manage to see some fun birds! the best bird was the male
yellow-shafted flicker that sat in a small tree about ten feet in
front of me, giving me excellent front and back views as he chatted
with two red-shafted flickers sitting on nearby branches. a cooper's
hawk made a half-hearted attempt to chase them, but the flickers
scattered in different directions, leaving the cooper's hawk sitting
"empty-handed" on a low branch across the pathway.

while at the fill, i also saw goldfinches and yellow-rumped warblers
in the brush near the urban horticulture center. i talked briefly with
a volunteer from the urban hort center before i left, and this man
mentioned a "very tiny bird" that he saw sitting in a bush near the
building, wondering if this tiny bird could have been a hummingbird.
hrm, i dunno, said i, but i know that anna's hummers do stick around
during the winter, cuz there was one who would buzz my head every
morning when i arrived at the front door of my building last winter.

well, that's all for now!

regards,

Deborah Wisti-Peterson email:nyneve at u.washington.edu
Department of Zoology, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash, USA
Visit me on the web: http://students.washington.edu/~nyneve/
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