Barbara and I drove last Friday from Medford, OR to Crater Lake via
Oregon 62 and stopped at Joseph Stewart State Park which surrounds
Prospect Lake, behind the Lost Creek Dam, a flood control project on the
upper Rogue River at around 3,000 ft elevation, about 30 miles NE of
Medford. We followed two Sharp-shinned Hawks into the park and watched
them hunt through lakeshore willows oblivious to a raucous crowd of
Steller's Jays who urged them to leave. We walked out onto the dry bed
of the largely drawn-down lake to see what turned out to be American
Pipits and Savannah Sparrows. Spotting waterfowl on the part of the
lake we could see we went closer to where we could scope out American
Coots with Green-winged Teal and a lone female Surf Scoter. As we
walked back toward the park we were overtaken by a fellow in an ORV who
had been down at the lakeshore, and told us he had just photographed 8
Surf Scoters at a different part of the lake. An employee at the power
plant below the dam, he is part of a group which is trying to photograph
all the birds that stop at Prospect Lake, which this year, he says,
included a Black Turnstone and a Ruff. Be all that as it may, we saw
the Surf Scoter ourselves, and suppose that more people out birding in
out-of-the-way places may perhaps turn up enough sightings to eventually
revise some ideas about where birds spend their time -- like our Surf
Scoters recreating at a mountain lake, as the duck flies, some 75 miles
from the ocean.

Paul Webster
Seattle
paul.webster at attbi.com