I'm struck by looking at the latest postings in tweeters at how much time
birders spend at malls, marinas, sewage lagoons, suburban yards, city parks,
and other heavily humanized habitats. It finally struck me that one of the
reasons I see so few rare birds is that my wife loves to get out of the city
and into nature, as far from people as possible, and that's the only way I
can entice her to go birding. "Why would I want to go to a mall?" is a
question I find hard to answer, and thus I still haven't seen a Great-tailed
Grackle in Washington.

On trips last winter and earlier this month I realized how many of the
wintering birds of Okanogan County can be found only in altered landscapes.
If you spend time in native forest or grassland, you see and hear very
little if anything, but as soon as you enter a town or pass a farmstead,
that's where all the birds are - mostly being fed by humans in one way or
another. I think we might be quite amazed if we really knew the degree of
change in the avifauna in eastern Washington in the past few hundred years.
My guess is that there were virtually no wintering birds in, for example,
the sagebrush habitats of central Washington. The land birds one sees there
nowadays are mostly associated with farms and feedlots. Perhaps Common
Ravens and Horned Larks comprised the wintering avifauna of yesteryear, with
raptors in good vole years.

Birds are frequent in wetlands, natural or altered, yet the reason we see so
many birds on the Columbia River in that same county is that its flow has
been slowed by dams, and the reservoirs that remain are not the original
Columbia River, which probably supported relatively few birds. Even those
birds that use the flowing parts of it are often just below the dams,
waiting for their free fish feast.

Just a thought.

Dennis Paulson

--
Netta Smith and Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115