Subject: Columbia River & Waterville Plateau
Date: Feb 16 11:31:52 2004
From: Hugh Jennings - hughbirder at earthlink.net


This is a report on the East L. WA Audubon field trip this past weekend. Ruth Sullivan gave such an excellent report on their trip that I will just supplement it with some of our observations. We left Kirkland at 8 a.m. Sat with 8 people and then waited to meet two others at Wenatchee, so we didn't get started birding until after 11 a.m. We followed the east side of the Columbia R. up to Chelan where we found the YELLOW-BILLED LOON at the riverfront walk park. That was the only location where we saw Northern Shoveler. We continued up the west side to Pateros. The mouth of the Methow R. had thousands of ducks of many species. We especially enjoyed the Redhead ducks and many Canvasbacks. We usually drive up to Twisp, but because of the late start we only got to Alta L. SP. We stayed at Pateros overnight where I got a chance to talk to Patrick early Sun. morning. We continued north to Brewster and then east via Grange Road to Bridgeport. Grange Road is where we saw 7-8 American Tree Sparrows which were life birds for some of our group. It was there we saw our only Northern Harrier of the trip. We continued south on hwy 17, then west on hwy 172. We also enjoyed some large flocks of Snow Buntings perched on wires east of Mansfield and Horned Larks were everywhere, but we didn't see any Lapland Longspurs. The Great Horned Owl was at its usual place in the grove of trees a few miles west of Mansfield. We saw about 8 Rough-legged Hawks on this stretch of hwy. We really enjoyed these beautiful raptors. At Withrow we saw one female Ring-necked Pheasant in town and 7-8 Gray Partridge back behind some of grain silos. It was good trip in dry, but cold weather. Our group ended up with 58 species for 1-1/2 days, so didn't do near as well as Ruth.

Hugh Jennings
Bellevue, WA
hughbirder at earthlink.net