Are Says Phoebe's seen in western Washington very frequently? There's probably
someone out there with the definitive database (Russell Rogers?) to answer
that question.

I looked in the Wildlife Observation card file at Washington Department of
Fish and Wildlife. This card file is a relict from the late 70s & early 80s,
an era when a federal program called "Young Adult Conservation Corps" gave
me a minimum wage job building the clearinghouse of information on Washington's
nongame wildlife. Several years later the program was terminated... but not
before some 100,000 plus observations of wildlife had been carefully transcribed
from the accession logs of museums, Audubon Chapter Newsletters, and a variety
of other sources, including virtually all of the early issues of the Journal
known as "The Murrelet". Anyway, I found very few western Washington Says Phoebe
observations in this file (which makes me all the more excited about seeing
one on the Olympia CBC on December 14th, a sighting shared by Gary Wiles).
I only found 4 other western Washington records (I'm sure some digging would
uncover many more):

September 27, 1977 - 3 miles south of Luhr Beach, Nisqually (Dave Hayward)
March 21, 1980 - McAllister Creek side of Nisqually NWR (Evelyn Peasley)
September 8, 1980 - edge of Ocean Shores Game Range (Swink, Nasseth, E. Hunn)
March 1, 1989 - east side of Budd Inlet, DNR Marine Station (K. McAllister)

So, I'm proud to announce that, out of the five sightings I was able to find,
I'm responsible for 2 of them. Three of the five sightings (including this
year's Christmas Bird Count sighting) were from the same vicinity in the Nisqually
valley bottom.

O.K., now please flood me with additional western Washington sightings so that
everything I thought was special about my little research effort becomes moot.

Kelly McAllister
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife
Olympia, Washington
Reply to: mcallkrm at dfw.wa.gov