Sorry about the previous blank message. I'm just getting the hang of
posting.

This message is regarding an unusual sighting I had a couple weeks ago in
Vancouver. My wife and I were running in Stanley Park of Vancouver a
couple weeks ago and were stopped by an unusually richl whistled call which
I didn't recognize. We located the bird in some brambles up from the
seawall path. The light was terrible (we were facing the sun). But we did
see it fly a couple times and the tail looked very much like a cuckoo's
tail: graduated and white-tipped. That along with the distinctive 4-note
call (1st, 3rd, and 4th note of the same high pitch, and the 2nd note a
lower pitch) made me quickly realize that it was like no other bird I had
seen. It was towhee-sized. We couldn't get a good look at color, but it
was fairly bland colored. My wife said that she might have seen some rust
color to it. The bill was not over-sized. Behavior wise, it looked a bit
like a nervous sparrow, probably because there were two song sparrows
chasing it off. After a minute or two, it flew off out of sight. During
the time we saw it, it probably called 3 or 4 times, and when it flew off,
it made a nervous chattery call. We took a walk in the same area a couple
days later and could not relocate it. Which doesn't suprise me, as the
bird was obviously out of place. The bird was originally located right
above the seawall walk, immediately underneath the stairway that goes up to
the "Teahouse". This will make sense if you know stanley park

I am quite familiar with wintering birds of the area, and this bird was
unlike anything I've come across. The strongly graduated tail and the
unfamiliar call convince me of that. I reported it to the vancouver
hotline promptly, but got no response. I originally wrote the bird off as
an escaped caged bird, but after thumbing through some of the more recent
editions of the classic bird guides which contain the Asian strays...
well who knows, right? Does anybody have any ideas or input. I would love
to hear it.

Kurt Ranta
mailto:kckar at earthlink.net
Mt. Vernon, Washington