Subject: Great Black-backed =?ISO-8859-1?B?/A==?=ber alles
Date: Jan 31 16:47:35 2004
From: Netta Smith - nettasmith at comcast.net


Hello, all you tweeters out in tweeterland.

Ian asked about the rare gulls in Renton, and it has been odd that no one
has posted anything about them, positive or negative, this week. Maybe
everyone has seen them? But I hadn't seen the bird that started it all, so
Netta and I used a trip to Fry's as an excuse to stop by the Cedar River
mouth today. We arrived at 12:20 to find Steve Mlodinow, Dennis Duffy, and
Steve and Connie Pink standing vigil. The first two had found the
Slaty-backed and two first-winter Glaucous gulls at Gene Coulon Park earlier
in the morning. The two Glaucous could still be seen from a distance on the
log booms off the park. Now we know there are at least FOUR Glaucous Gulls
in the area.

There weren't too many gulls at the river mouth when we arrived, and people
were getting a bit discouraged (Steve and Dennis had been there since dawn),
but finally their numbers began to pick up, small groups coming in from the
south. At 1:30 I was doing a routine scan, and THERE IT WAS! I could see a
big gull facing me with white head and breast and pink-based bill, and I
said "Oh oh, look at this bird . . . . . ." and then it turned sideways, and
I yelled something like "BINGO!" Or maybe "HOLY at #$%^&," I can't remember.
This was my fourth try for the bird, more time than I've spent on a rare
bird in Washington in years, but I had decided I wasn't going to give up
until I saw it.

Everyone got to see it well, but after only a few minutes, something got all
the gulls up in the air. None of us had binoculars on the GBB, and of course
we couldn't follow it in our scopes, so we lost it, and most of the gulls
then flew away. Too bad, as we would have had some more time to admire it
before the Boeing Boom-Boom Truck arrived and scared the rest away not long
afterward.

Anyway, I'd like to personally thank Gene Hunn for finding and identifying
this bird. Gene, you haven't lost your touch! And I'll thank Ruth Sullivan
who wouldn't let me stop trying. "Keep on birding, keep on birding"
(remember Finding Nemo?). I could go on, but this isn't the Academy Awards.

So, does that answer your question, Ian?

Dennis Paulson
--
Netta Smith and Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115