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The Wahkiakum Count, straddling the Columbia river halfway between
Longview and Astoria, took place on December 28. Morning clouds and a
little fog
dispersed by afternoon, giving us a day that was mostly sunny with
temperatures in the mid-fifties, though a chilly east wind forced
counters to work a little harder
to find passerines.

The tally for the day was 99 species plus two hybrids, a little lower
than our intitial two years of 108 and 102. Two species were new to the
count this year.
Tom Kollasch found a dozen HORNED LARKS on White's Island (upstream
of Puget Island). We'd always suspected that some larks wintered there,
but until this year had been unable to get a boat out there. White's
Island
is one of the few remaining breeding areas for the Streaked Horned Lark in
Washington. Shortly after tallying the larks, Tom, who is a biologist
for the Julia
Butler Hansen Refuge, spent most of the remainder of the count day
trying to fix
the refuge jetboat, leaving a couple thousand acres of refuge unexplored
(too bad!).
The second new species was a CLARK'S GREBE that Mike Patterson foundnear
Aldrich Point. What would have been a third new species, WILD TURKEY,
appeared
outside the northern edge of the count circle. The introduced turkeys appear
to be established in Wahkiakum County, but not across the river in Clatsop.
With a drier than normal fall, there was less flooding of pastures
throughout the
area, making ducks harder to find. Also noticably absent were loons - we found
few COMMON LOONS this year, and no Pacific or Red-throated Loons. Other
notable
misses this year were Ruddy Duck, Sharp-shinned Hawk and Hutton's Vireo.
Many other species less common to the count circle did make an
appearance, however,
including a NORTHERN SHRIKE on marshy Welch Island in the middle of the
Columbia, ten GREATER WHITE-FRONTED GEESE, a CANVASBACK, LONG-BILLED
DOWITCHER,
MOURNING DOVES, an ORANGE-CROWNED WARBLER, and a WHITE-THROATED SPARROW
CANADA GOOSE replaced GREATER SCAUP as the most numerous species in the
count this year, with close to six thousand individuals.

-Andrew Emlen

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--
Mike Patterson Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo,
Astoria, OR it is not enough to be persecuted
celata at pacifier.com by an unkind establishment,
you must also be right.
---Robert Park
http://www.pacifier.com/~mpatters/bird/bird.html