I manipulated my schedule and got away yesterday afternoon for Lake Ozette
in hopes that the Northern Parula Bob Boekelheide reported last weekend
might still be there. On the basis of a late phone call to the Ozette ranger
station I was fairly confident it would still be there. I arrived at 7:20 PM
and found no rangers about and wasn't sure precisely where it had been
hanging out, but heard an unfamiliar song from the top of a spruce near the
restrooms at the end of the road. I recorded snatches of it amongst the full
throttle Warbling Vireos, Song Sparrows, and Wilson's Warbler but got no
response to playback before it got darkish. The song was not exactly how I
remembered Northern Parulas, being a soft ascending warble with three very
high fine notes at the end. There was a crew of Makah tribal fisheries
biologists there censusing the threatened Ozette River sockeye run, and they
had seen the bird, photographed and videotaped it. They assured me it would
be down in the alders at eye level in the morning.

Ozette is a fine spot near the end of the earth. I listened to Common
Nighthawks at dusk and had a Barred Owl calling off and on during the night
(there's a family with young here, according to the fisheries guys; crows
got on it in the morning and I got a good look finally). At 5:20 AM I heard
a much more typical Parula song from the same high spruce, but again could
not lure it down. However, by 6:30 it was foraging about 25 feet up in some
alders, singing all the while, and afforded excellent views, though the sky
was gray and the colors muted.

I don't know exactly how many valid Parula records we have, but I know of at
least four from the outer coastal strip. The first two were found on the
same day in September sometime in the early 1980s, one by Ben Feltner's bird
group at Neah Bay (very near the present sighting), the other on Burrows
Road at Grays Harbor by Glen and Wanda Hoge. Neither was seen subsequently.
George Gerdts found one near Tokeland a few years later. [There's also a
Seattle record, one from Vantage, and I suspect a few others.] Is this the
first spring record [Russell?]? In any case, Parula's may show a preference
for Sitka spruce with Bryoria lichens (which resemble the Spanish "moss" of
their native haunts in the southeastern US), as there were a few strands of
the lichen here and lots at the Burrows Road location. Northern Parula's
have nested at least twice in coastal central California (e.g., Pt. Pinos)
in superficially similar habitats. Interesting.

Gene Hunn
enhunn at home.com