Hi Tweeters,

Made a run up to Silvana today (15 January) and was successful in finding
the RUSTY BLACKBIRD which Steve Mlodinow had reported last Friday. As
mentioned on the report I made to the BirdBox, Steve?s directions were
perfect. Here are they are again:

Take Pioneer Highway north from Silvana.
Go west on Norman Road three-quarters of a mile.
There's a dairy farm there. There was a flock of several hundred RED-WINGED
and BREWER'S BLACKBIRDS with one RUSTY.

I first located the bird at about 12:45 this afternoon for a split second
near a small pond adjacent to a barn on the north side of the road. The
barn is about 100 yards east of the main farm buildings. At about 1:30 I
had prolonged scope views of the bird perched on a telephone wire with
BREWER?S BLACKBIRDS above the house adjacent to the main farm buildings. I
believe the house number was 2305. This is almost exactly three quarters of
a mile from the junction of Norman Road and Pioneer Highway. The bird is a
male with bright rust coloration about the head, mantle and tertials. The
depiction of a winter male in Sibley is quite similar, however, the bird
today had a less extensive mask, which did not extend behind the eye as much
as in the field guide. The blackbirds did their usual thing of flying
around quite a bit but did tend to stay in a relatively cohesive group.
They also didn?t appear to range much beyond the fields between Norman Road
and the dairy farm.

At about 2:45 p.m. I also saw the HARRIS? SPARROW on Camano Island, which
had been found on the Skagit Bay CBC by Hal Opperman and JoLynn Edwards.
Hal?s excellent directions are posted below:

>From Stanwood, take SR-532 west onto Camano Island.
At Terry's Corner, where the highway forks (left branch signed to Camano
Island State Park), stay right onto North Camano Drive. In about four miles
turn right onto Brokaw Road at Huntington's Grocery. In about four tenths
of a mile turn left onto Rocky Point Drive and go south one short block to
Granite Lane. The northeast corner of this intersection is a vacant lot
grown to blackberries. Here was the Harris's Sparrow along with many House
Sparrows and a few Golden-crowned Sparrows and Spotted Towhees.

The sparrow was with all the usual suspects in the very patch that Hal
mentions.

Good Luck and Good Birding!

Ted Kenefick
Seattle, WA
tedk at nwlink.com