Hey tweets, Taking Stuart Mackay's advice (always bird the Fill after it
stops raining), I headed out yesterday afternoon. Sure enough, I found some
great birds. Hordes of yellow-rumped warblers were hanging from every
branch of the tall cottonwoods near the wooden sign at the east entrance.
More hordes (if that isn't redundant) were hawking for bugs along the
treeline of the trail leading down to the dead beaver trees. I searched
carefully for other species of warblers but kept getting distracted by the
really huge numbers of yellow-rumps. It was a kind of fallout, I guess.

On the main pond were three very nervous greater yellow-legs. When they
weren't leaping into the air to fly around calling and then settling again,
they were bobbing their heads furiously and calling, getting ready to go.
At any rate, they were never still. If the strong south wind that was
blowing through the Fill yesterday kept up all night, they're probably
still there. Otherwise, I suspect they left in the night.

Yesterday's wind and rain knocked down a lot of the grassy plants in
Shoveler Pond, making the search for a sharp-tailed sandpiper more
realistically optimistic than ever, but yesterday was not my day to find
any. Again. Never mind. I'm sure the day will come some time, just as I
know that some day another smew will show up in our state, and a garganay
too. If any of you old-timer tweeters remember the last time you saw either
of these ducks, I wish you would post something. I have vague memories of
such birds very early in my birding career, but I didn't chase then because
I didn't know how rare these sightings were. Now that fall has arrived and
we're going to be stuck indoors more, your memories would be nice
dream-makers for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, back at the Fill, in the bay were 12 wood ducks, the males all
in spectacular breeding plumage. These birds never look to me like they
belong in drab Washington state; I've always thought they belong more in
China or perhaps New Zealand - somewhere tropical and exotic. But they're
ours, along with other outrageously colored birds such as cedar waxwings
and harlequin ducks. The wood ducks were preening boldly in the bay and
didn't mind me looking at them, as the autumn sun turned them into glowing
sources of light themselves. Oddly, the other birds on the bay were all
clustered together into tightly packed groups segregated by species:
pied-bill grebes, double-crested cormorants, wigeons, gadwalls. I expected
the ducks to do that, but not the cormorants or grebes. We may know a lot
about nature, but there is even more we don't know. - Connie, Seattle

csidles at mail.isomedia.com