Hi All,

Wendy and I returned from a three day trip to E.WA. concentrating on the Waterville Plateau. Our number one target bird was Sharp-tailed Grouse with Snow Bunting and Gray-crowned Rosy Finch vying for runner-up. Thanks to advice from Patrick Sullivan we found a flock of about ten Sharp-tailed off the Bridgeport Hill Rd. about five miles south of Bridgeport on Sunday morning. Also on Sunday we observed a flock of 300+ Snow buntings within a range of one to two hundred feet from our vantage point along highway 172 about two miles east of Mansfield. They were feeding on seed heads of grasses that were mostly covered with snow. After a few minutes the whole flock would fly up, wheel around for a while and settle back down twenty feet from where they had left off. They were quite efficient at covering the grassy area and very satisfying to watch.

We struck out on the GCRF but saw a large number of raptors including two Golden Eagles, numerous Rough-legged and Red-tailed hawks, a Gyrfalcon, a Prairie, a Merlin, countless Kestrels, a Sharpie, a N. Harrier and several Bald Eagles. We couldn't find a Peregrine (to make it a five falcon weekend) to save our souls. We tried our best to get back to Seattle, where they are somewhat reliable, before dark but we couldn't make it.

The Waterville Plateau is starkly beautiful in Winter, but it requires a lot of driving and it is a very bad place to be in nasty weather. There was an ice storm a few days earlier that I was very happy to have missed. The temperature hovered around the freezing point during daylight and dropped a little below at night.

Good birding, Alan Roedell