Hey tweets, Sports thoughts have been filling my mind of late, no doubt on
account of the NCAA championships. Not that I'm a basketball fan, apologies
all around to those who are. But basketball put an end to my promising
career as a badminton player, when I briefly played basketball in college
and a girl leviathan stopped me from reaching the basket by standing on my
foot as I was trying to turn. There went my knee and my badminton career.

If not for that incident, how different my life would have been. I would
undoubtedly have made millions on the worldwide badminton circuit and be
signing autographs to this very day. My face and form would be on badminton
cards that would be traded for thousands of dollars - "Whoa, you got a
Connie Sidles card, you lucky stiff."

Instead, I have to haul myself around the Fill and stare at birds. Oh, wait.
That's really great.

Well, I won't say that that girl opponent did me a favor exactly, but it
goes to show that life deals you twists and turns that you think are bad at
the time, because things aren't turning out like you planned. But maybe in
the long run, things turn out great after all. Because there is nothing
quite like going out on a beautiful spring morning and finding warblers - or
anything else that could turn up for a happy surprise.

The birding world is so very, very different from sports. In sport, you have
winners (yah, I'm up) and losers (moan, I'm down). In birding, whether you
see "the bird" or not, you're always going to find something wonderful. Even
on the days when you slog all day and see nothing, you're having a wonderful
experience, right? Minimum, you can entertain your friends with tales of
your weirdness. I mean, "America's Funniest Video" (or whatever that show is
called) has nothing on John and me when we're out in a gale in Maine trying
to keep from getting blown right off a jetty while the locals are taking
bets on how far we'll get. Imagine how many dinners you can dine out with on
that story alone. And we've all got dozens of stories like that.

So was I disappointed when I went to the Fill yesterday and this morning and
didn't find the shrike? No, I was elated because I saw my first
orange-crowned warbler of the season. What a great little guy. He was
foraging in the willows on the east side of the greenhouses. The CUH people
are reworking the brambles there and have made paths all the way down to the
lake. I have thought all winter that this habitat would be good for warblers
in the spring, and I was right. Also on view there were some perfectly
stunning yellow-rumped warblers all decked out in full breeding plumage.
With the sun glinting on their yellow throats, they glowed with life.

Here's what else I saw:
pied-billed grebe
double-crested cormorant
great blue heron
Canada goose (including hordes of little cacklers scarcely bigger than
shovelers)
mallard
green-winged teal
American wigeon
northern pintail
northern shoveler
cinnamon teal
ruddy duck
ring-necked duck
greater scaup
lesser scaup
bufflehead
common merganser
hooded merganser
American coot
killdeer
glaucous-winged gull
bald eagle
osprey (beautiful views of one hunting over Union Bay)
red-tailed hawk
Cooper's hawk
rock pigeon
Anna's hummingbird
belted kingfisher
northern flicker (both red- and yellow-shafted)
downy woodpecker
tree swallow
violet-green swallow
Steller's jay
American crow
bushtit
black-capped chickadee
Bewick's wren
marsh wren
ruby-crowned kinglet
American robin
European starling
orange-crowned warbler
yellow-rumped warbler (both myrtle and Audubon's)
spotted towhee
white-crowned sparrow
song sparrow
red-winged blackbird
house sparrow
American goldfinch
house finch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com