Subject: Nisqually to Lake Washington 12/14-15
Date: Feb 15 21:11:34 2004
From: Mark Miller - snowyowl98683 at msn.com


Hi Everyone--

Marcia Marvin and I had a concert date in Lacey on 2/14, and we stopped at
Nisqually NWR on the way. Best bird was a SHORT-EARED OWL hunting, perching,
and preening about 200 yards out Brown's Dike Trail (the long one). On the
15th, we went to Gene Coulon Park and the south end of Lake Washington
between the Renton Boeing facility and Renton Municipal Airport, searching
for gulls between 10am and 4pm. Bart Weldon of Spokane joined us around 3pm.
We found a total of 7 gull species (California, Ring-billed, Mew, Herring,
Thayer's, Western, Glaucous-winged), a suspect for the bird that people are
calling a Great Black-backed (I could not assign any name to it, despite
decent views, but it resembled in size [really big], head color [white],
bill shape and color [massive, pink with black tip], and overall structure
[broad across the beam, mottled back, dark gray wings with some mottling but
not what I could call anchors, black wingtips] the bird that others have
photographed), plus every Western/Glaucous-winged backcross imaginable; the
total gull numbers were in the 3000 range. Other birds we noticed included
two Bald Eagles, impressive numbers of Common Mergansers (one raft of 100,
plus scattered others), two Greater Scaup, two Canvasback, 10 or so
CommonGoldeneye. Someone working for the airport comes out to the north end
of the runway several times in the late afternoon to shoot off noise bombs.
The gulls stay away for 10 minutes, then come back, but it doesn't promote
leisurely studies. If there's a Tweeter out there who works for Boeing,
there are large numbers of gulls to check out in the Boeing parking lots off
Park Avenue.

We understand the putative Great Black-backed Gull was seen Friday 2/13 on
the grass at the north end of the Cedar Creek access road.

Mark Miller
Vancouver, WA
snowyowl98683 at msn.com

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