Subject: Rainier morning, new gull book
Date: Sep 14 16:12:51 2003
From: Netta Smith - nettasmith at comcast.net
Hello, tweets.
Just a note on a fine experience at Mount Rainier this morning (Sunday, 14
Sep 2003).
Netta and I and Rick Droker and Eileen Bryant took a short hike above
Sunrise along Sourdough Ridge this morning. It was a beautiful sunny
morning, warm when out of the brisk NW breeze. There were birds all over the
place!
Although we didn't see all that many, it seemed that there weren't long
intervals between hawk sightings, but some may have merely been cruising
around over the area. We saw Red-tails almost continually, but as they were
hunting, they may have been (temporarily) local birds rather than migrants.
We did see a very odd immature at Tipsoo Lake earlier in the morning,
heavily barred and blotched all over the underside but definitely a
Red-tailed. I wondered if it might be an immature Harlan's.
We saw at least two Merlins, one female American Kestrel, and one immature
female Sharp-shinned Hawk while on the ridge. One Merlin dove at a passerine
flying above the ridge but missed it. Another Merlin went past us just
skimming through the tops of the firs, so fast it was gone almost as quickly
as we saw it coming. The kestrel flew by high up, heading south. The
sharp-shin was heading south but paused for an aerial dogfight with a
Clark's Nutcracker that was breathtaking in its speed and twists and turns,
with birds alternating pursuer and pursued (just as I see with corvids and
sharp-shins in my yard).
Flocks of smaller birds were in sight regularly, including American Pipits,
Pine Siskins, Cedar Waxwings, Band-tailed Pigeons (which I hadn't seen
before at Sunrise), and a fair number of distant unidentified birds.
Interestingly, they weren't all going south; some crossed over the ridge
heading north, others flew along the east-west ridge. Through the low trees
moved sparrow and junco flocks almost continuously, including Chipping,
Savannah, Lincoln's, Fox, and Gambel's White-crowned; Chipping and Dark-eyed
Junco much the most common. Small numbers of Golden-crowned Kinglets,
Yellow-rumped Warblers, Chestnut-backed and Mountain chickadees, and
Red-breasted Nuthatches moved through the trees higher up. A Hermit Thrush
and a robin and a flicker were seen. Distant swifts were seen too quickly to
be identified.
At one point we were amazed by the number of passerines, mostly juncos and
Chipping Sparrows, in a little clump of conifers. I thought it was peculiar
that they were all concentrated in one spot and all pretty much sitting
still. Then the reason became apparent, a Northern Pygmy-Owl perched right
in the open. It was in bright sun, it was tame, and I had my camera with 400
mm lens around my neck; enough said.
Clark's Nutcrackers were flying across the ridge constantly, coming up from
the Sunrise parking lot area with absolutely bulging crops (almost bizarrely
so) and flying back south empty, a continuous process the whole time we were
there. I don't know if people were feeding them in the parking lot or
whether they had a very productive bunch of whitebark pines from which to
harvest seeds. The Yellow Pine Chipmunks were certainly doing so in the tops
of the pines near us.
A Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel stayed under foot as we ate some breakfast
at the edge of the parking lot, vacuuming up our crumbs so quickly and
effectively I named it "Hoover."
Now, about the new gull book. I was delighted to get my copy just a few days
ago, but in only the briefest perusal I saw a number of errors, a little
shocking, but I didn't keep track of them. I didn't realize the extent of
the problem until I just read the recent posts about it on tweeters. What a
shame!
Of the errors I can recall, the California Gull map doesn't show the
breeding populations in our state, and the legends for the Herring X
Glaucous-winged and Western X Glaucous-winged gulls are reversed on the
plate showing them. The others I saw were more or less typographical, but
the kind spell checkers would miss. I don't recall ever before seeing that
many errors in such a brief look at such an important book.
I was also disappointed that no one in this part of the world was contacted
for photos, as among those of us who photograph gulls, we have a huge supply
of images (I have about 1500), some of which would have been very
appropriate in the book; some plumages of some of our common species weren't
even represented. It's still a monumental work, a paradigm of a bird book if
you ignore the errors, but I too wish I had waited for the second printing!
I can sympathize with the authors, however, as they may have gone on a
six-week vacation after they turned in the manuscript of this megabook. And
authors don't always play a part in the layout of books, even sometimes in
the captions of photos!
Dennis Paulson
--
Netta Smith and Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115