Spent the a.m., 5:00 - noon, at Nisqually River mouth, near the mouth of Red Salmon Creek. I was
curious to see if there were as many Common Mergansers as I remembered seeing in August, 1988
when I last counted Band-tailed Pigeons there. Mike Walker and I spotted a large group of
mergansers. I estimated there were about 75. Mike looked them over as they were moving along
at a great distance and estimated about 90. I looked them over again and agreed he was pretty
close. It wasn't long before they did the "scuttling" behavior so typical of this time of
year, vigourously paddling to get up on a pretty good plane, but seldom using their wings. They
came right on over by us and waddled out on the end of the spit. Before long they were back
in the water and stayed calm long enough to get a good, accurate count.... 194 birds. I thought
I remembered somewhere in the vicinity of 800-1000 of them in 1988. So, I'm interested in
seeing if numbers grow as summer progresses. Dave Nysewander told me that the Puget Sound
Ambient monitoring water bird folks often see large concentrations of Common Mergansers
at the mouths of large rivers on Puget Sound during the summer. It seems likely that these
estuaries are molt-migration destinations. Perhaps all the scuttling is an indication that
the birds are flightless. However, it also seems possible that these flocks include mostly
young-of-the-year and they simply are not strong flyers and prefer to paddle from place to
place. All of the birds look identical, like adult females. Are these large flocks made up
entirely of young-of-the-year and adults females? Someone with a copy of Bent's treatise
on the mergs might find all of the answers.

Lots of Purple Martin activity on this eastern side of the Nisqually estuary. There are nine
boxes in apparently good condition on pilings in the intertidal. They are numbers, M-1, M-2,
Through M-9. It appeared that Purple Martins occupied at least two of them and Starlings two
others.

Quite a few Bald Eagles around, including at least 4 adults and 3 subadults. Also, an osprey
and 70-80 Great Blue Herons. Some of the herons are juveniles indicating that somewhere
there are heron nests that actually fledge young rather than just rearing them up big enough
to provide eagle food on a stick platform.

Also on the mudflats, 10 raccoons, a dozen or so Harbor Seals, and 3 River Otters.

On the upper beach and in the rip-rap, a Black-tailed Deer and a Red Fox family of three.

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