We visited the other (east) side of the mountains for the first time today,
and
I had a very enjoyable day's birding. I'll annotate life birds with an (L),
and state
birds with an (S).

Following up on a report of ? from a few weeks ago, we took I-90 to Kittitas
and
took the Old Vantage Road from there. Almost immediately after we left
Kittitas, a long-billed curlew (L) flew over. I don't know how many life
birds I've
had as fly-bys from the car (can't be many!), but this particular ID was not
difficult. Very shortly after that I saw a flash of blue, and pulled over
to see my
third-ever mountain bluebird (S), and my first west of 70 degrees longitude.

On to the Quilomene Area and got all three of the birds that I was targeting
from ?'s report: sage sparrow (L), sage thrasher (L), and Brewer's sparrow
(L).
Also saw an indeterminate hummer, one of three such on the day. Where I
come from, hummingbird ID isn't much of an issue ("Was that a male or a
female ruby-throated hummingbird?"). They all seemed pretty small, and
one of them clearly had a lot of white underneath. I'd guess calliope on
all three, but I'm not very confident.

Next was the museum/headquarters at Gingko-Wampanum State Park,
overlooking the Columbia at Vantage. Here we had white-throated swift (L),
(at which point I checked in with mom via cell phone), Caspian tern (S),
a Say's phoebe with an under-the-eaves nest visible from the museum
entrance (though from the looks of it, they either fledged late today or
will
do so tomorrow), Nashville warbler (S), warbling vireo (S), western tanager,
western kingbird, rock wren, yellow-bellied marmot (S), and Western skink
(L).
Three miles further down the Old Vantage Highway we had bank swallow (S)
and black-billed magpie (S).

We popped in at Taneum Canyon on the way home, and I saw my first
dipper of the year and another male western tanager.

Back home in Redmond, I went down to Marymoor and saw among other things
a black-headed grosbeak, a green heron, and at least four barn owls, and
possibly
as many as seven. I heard one hissing in a tree, where it was joined
moments
later by a second, both of them on the edge of the eastern parking lot for
the
dog area. I walked down about the long row of trees that roughly connects
the
two dog-area lots, and at the far end I encountered more owls. There was a
moment
during which I could hear at least two screaming in separate trees while two
more were
in the air. Between the several screams and flying around, it was hard to
be sure, but
I thought at one point there may have been five. I don't know whether the
original two
had slipped past me, or whether these birds were separate. But boy, were
there a lot
of owls! I left them alone so as not to upset them any further. While my
departure was
not an act of cowardice, it is uncanny how unsettling their scream is even
when you
know exactly what it is and where it's coming from.

All in all, I had a wonderful Mother's Day without having borne a single
child...


Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA