Subject: Westside Swainson's Hawks
Date: Jan 21 18:55:56 2004
From: Gary Bletsch - garybletsch at yahoo.com


Dear Ruth and Tweeters,

Regarding Swainson's Hawks on the west side of Washington State, I can only say that a group of local birders (including Keith and Jan Wiggers, Bob Kuntz, Kraig Kemper, myself, and several others) put together a compilation of bird sightings for Skagit County. The list went through a number of periodic revisions throughout the 1990's, largely through the efforts of Keith and Jan Wiggers. Information from these revisions eventually went into the "Washington Birder" checklists put together by Ken Knittle and Company.

As of the mid-1990's, we had not come upon any county records of Swainson's Hawks.

Later on, the species was confirmed as having occurred in Skagit County, as follows:

May 3, 1997, Butler Flats (Dahlstedt Road): G Bletsch, K Wiggers, D McClure, Rusty Kuntze;

May 10, 1997, south of Padilla Bay near the Farmhouse Inn (SR 20 near Whitney Junction): Bud Anderson; bird thought not to be the same one as the May third bird;

July 12, 1999, south side of Sauk Mountain: G Bletsch.

The group has not had any regular meetings for a long time, and so we have not compiled any subsequent records, for this species or any other.

Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch





Ruth Taylor <rutht at seanet.com> wrote:
Does anyone have a list of the westside sightings - dates and locations
(other than Gene's King County data)?

Ruth Taylor
rutht at seanet.com





Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


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