The woods behind my house are awash in winter wrens. They are everywhere, it
seems hardly a fern frond is spared the attentions of one of these little
birds. The young of the year have hatched, and one in particular caught my
eye, she had a interesting sort of twirling motion with her tail, which went
faster as she got excited, sort of like a helicopter. Yesterday morning I
sat and watched from a good viewing area as she worked over the Sword ferns
in search of food. She covered about 10 feet square, often returning back to
an overgrown stump more or less in the center of her foraging area. Then
suddenly some kind of bottle fly I think went zig zagging through the ferns
and she was off after it. It was kind of hard to follow all the twists and
turns, as they ducked under, between and around the ferns. At one point the
fly went straight up, maybe ten feet in the air, closely followed by the
wren. The fly then made the mistake of diving, and the wren made an
impressive corkscrewing dive and, just luckily for me, the light and focus
on my binos caught the very last moment as she snapped her bill shut on the
fly. She landed almost immediately, and rocked back and forth on a small
huckleberry bush. Her tail was going around and around and I could only
surmise that it must have been a tasty fly indeed. At this point she was
well beyond the area she has been foraging in, and she returned again back
to her "home" stump, rested up a bit, then starting foraying out again.

Rob Sandelin
South Snohomish County at the headwaters of Ricci Creek
Sky Valley Environments <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous at msn.com


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