I watched a peregrine falcon hunting for two hours at Mukilteo State Park
yesterday
afternoon. This is a small, open park along the shore adjacent to the ferry
to the south.

He made a total of six passes on my watch (over a span of two hours),
returning after
all but the last to a tall bare-branched conifer just south of and across
the railroad from
the park.

He missed on his first four attempts, all of which were on the pigeons
gathered in the
parking lot, and apparently on his fifth, which I did not see. I had looked
away at the
wrong moment, and then looked around at the parking lot crowd, but he must
have gone
in another direction. On his last pass, he made a sharp turn while he was
still among the
trees; he disappeared from sight and did not return. Perhaps he was
successful at long
last.

If anyone goes that way regularly, it might be worth a quick aside to check
this tree.

A couple of other interesting notes:

-- There was a hook-billed crow there: his somewhat misshapen upper
mandible arced
down over his lower mandible a full inch and a quarter (I had a point-blank
view of him
in the lot, so this guess is reasonably accurate). One of the fishermen
there said he'd
been around for years.

-- I saw three large terns flying high and away, and said to myself "Ah,
Caspian terns."
But when I got the glasses on one, the bill appeared to be yellowish orange,
closer if
anything to yellow. Then I thought "Wait, that's not a Caspian" before
further reflection
told me that there weren't any other good candidates around here. They were
out of
sight before I could do any more examination.

So two questions:
(1) Do Caspian tern bills ever look yellowish?
(2) Just how implausible is a trio (assuming they were the same species) of
Royal or
Elegant Terns in Puget Sound in August?


Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA