The last several weeks I have visited various sites in the Blue mountains with my wife and our birding buddies. When I first moved to Walla Walla I spent as much time as I could in these magnificent mountains. As the kids grew, my time was spent with them, and I have been to the mountains on only rare occasions in the last 15 years. What a thrill to be back. It was also a thrill to see so few people. Years ago I remember many more people traveling Skyline Drive.

The mountains are full of birds. At every stop we hear birds all over. Unfortunately you hear 100 times more than you can see. I am convinced that birds fly into trees and land so that we birders are hidden from their view. They certainly rarely land so that they can be seen. The good side of this is that I am forced to upgrade my song identifying skills.

Last weekend we saw our first MacGillivray's warbler of the year. These birds are plentiful and we hear them wherever we stop. Seeing one--even for a brief few seconds was a thrill. Also heard and saw several Townsend solitaire.

Other commonly heard birds are ruby-crowned kinglet, red-breasted nuthatch (easier to see than many other species), and Swainson's thrush. These are heard at almost every stop. Hermit and varied thrush are also singing. The eery and beautiful thrush songs--often heard at a great distance--give the mountains a magical mysterious quality.

We ate lunch at Godman Springs and were treated to some unusual birding. Two pine siskin flew into a firepit and rooted around there for several minutes. While we were looking at the siskin, a red crossbill joined them in the firepit. The crossbill looked huge. At first we thought it was a grosbeak. We hear and see crossbills fairly frequently in the mountains, and I had assumed that they were the size of house finch (which my guides confirm is the case). This sighting of a "huge" crossbill impressed me once again with the difficulty in using analog, rather than digital, fieldmarks. This bird obviously looked much larger than we expected because we were seeing it at such a close distance. We usually see crossbills high in the conifers and directly overhead. One of our number had heard of birds liking firepits, but we could not imagine why. Anyone else seen this behaviour?

We saw two turkey vultures flying low over Teepee Springs campground. We think this is an unusual sighting, but we need to check with our resident experts the Dennys. They certainly surprised us. We seem to be seeing an unusual amount of turkey vultures in our area this year.

Joe Corvino
Walla Walla
mailto: corvinojm at aya.yale.edu