Tweets - birding on the 4th of July has its plusses and its minuses. On the
positive side, there's no traffic to fight through, and there's less road noise
once you arrive. On the negative side, there are more non-birders at the park,
it's impossible to score a latte beforehand, and you just *know* it's going to
rain. So I was less than 100% enthusiastic about birding today at Marymoor.
There were 8 of us today, including three people out for the first time on one
of my walks. It was heavily overcast, with on-and-off showers. Sometime
around 8:30 it rained pretty hard for 10 minutes or so. The light was bad,
yada, yada, yada.

BUT, despite this being the summer doldrums, the birding was actually pretty
good. Highlights:

Green Heron Two in slough near lake
PEREGRINE FALCON Flying west of W. Lake Samm. Pkwy, landed in firs
CASPIAN TERN One flew down-slough around 10:00
Black Swift At least 6 over the dog meadow around
9:30-10:00
Red-eyed Vireo A couple heard only - we didn't see any
Bullock's Oriole Male and 2 imms. near windmill after 11:00

Our first highlight, though, was seeing an OSPREY with a large (6-8") fish over
the weir. An adult BALD EAGLE came after the Osprey, and the two climbed to
quite a height, with the Osprey working quite hard to keep ahead of the eagle.
But after a couple of minutes the Osprey dropped the fish and the eagle caught
it (the fish) in mid-air. We pondered the significance of seeing the symbol of
our nation committing this act of piracy on the 4th of July...

MaryFrances noticed a PIED-BILLED GREBE nest just south of the Dog Central swim
area, on the west side of the slough.

We had multitudes of juvenile AMERICAN ROBINS and EUROPEAN STARLINGS. Again we
had 3-4 BELTED KINGFISHER, probably including young. A SONG SPARROW pair was
feeding a juvenile BROWN-HEADED COWBIRD. We had several families of DOWNY
WOODPECKER.

I had 51 species on the day, and the Caspian Tern raised the year total to 120
species.

Happy 4th Everyone

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland WA
== Hummer at isomedia.com
== http://www.scn.org/fomp/birding.htm