When you see those vast rafts of wintering and long strings of migrant Surf
Scoters scooting by the CA/OR/WA/BC coast in the Spring, did you ever wonder
where exactly some of them end up and path they take to get there? The Western
Ecological Research Center and USGS has put some of these tracking data on an
interesting website viewed at:

http://www.werc.usgs.gov/scoter/maps.html

This is all very new information linking the wintering birds to their
breeding areas. Check it out. Particularly interesting is Surf Scoter #39983
originating/wintering in the San Francisco Bay Area, moving north along the CA/OR/WA
coast to about Vancouver, BC, then turning sharply NE, then E, crossing over
the Cascades and Canadian Rockies, finally coming to rest on the shores of
Hudson Bay, Manitoba / NWT, just north of Churchill.

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Richard Rowlett
Seattle / Bellevue (Eastgate), WA, USA

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought" --Albert Szent-Gyorgi (1893-1986).
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