Subject: Hermit warblers
Date: Jun 22 09:42:47 2004
From: Connie Sidles - csidles at isomedia.com


Hey tweets, Mike West and I led a trip to Capitol State Forest up Rock Candy
Mountain Road (in the Olympia area) yesterday and found the forest
absolutely stuffed with HERMIT WARBLERS. Apparently they were having a
convention to discuss the hermit warbler growth management act or something.
Not to say that the little beggars were easy to see. I think I'm going to
have to spend a week in traction to readjust my warbler neck. The birds
preferred to stick to the upper canopy, lurking on the tops of dense conifer
branches and singing loudly but invisibly, then shooting out to another tree
like little yellow-nosed bullets, only to disappear into the foliage again.
At one point, we were about to focus on one that had come out more into the
open when a member of the hermit warbler chaperone brigade flew out,
chastised him for being so conspicuous and chased him back into the foliage,
never to be seen again.

Eventually everyone in our group got a good look at at least one hermit
warbler (by "good" I mean two full seconds, max, which, if you were an
android would be a lifetime but since we were all humans, amounted to just
about the ultimate in frustration). We were a curiously testy crowd. On the
one hand, we could hardly complain about our viewing chances. The hermit
warblers were literally everywhere along the road, once we got above 1200
feet. Then, too, we all did get clear looks, so clear that there was no
doubt at all that these were pure hermits and not Townsend crosses. But on
the other hand, our views were so incredibly brief, the merest snapshot and
then poof! gone.

And then we hit hermit heaven. We had pulled over by a clearing in the road
that looked down upon mixed forest and a spectacular view of the Olympics in
the distance. A couple of us spotted a male hermit warbler foraging in a
small fir tree below and close. Because we could look down on him, we were
able to get perfect views, as he foraged from branch to branch and from tree
to tree. We saw everything in perfect light: his golden head glowing in the
sun, the way the black on the back of his head tapered to nothing as it
reached his crown, his black throat stark against the spanking white of his
underparts, the way the white outer tail feathers flashed as he flicked his
tail, the gray spotted with black of his back. Stunning.

When he finally disappeared into the forest, we birders did what we always
do at such times. We heaved a sigh of pure happiness, pasted big grins on
our faces and just looked at each other. No need for words, and no words
adequate for our feelings.

The Capitol State Forest, by the way, was incredibly birdy. In the lowlands
we saw band-tailed pigeons, evening grosbeaks, purple finches, Swainson's
thrushes, a magnificent MacGillivray's warbler (one of my favorite
warblers), willow flycatchers and black-headed grosbeaks. In fact, it was
hard to keep the caravan moving up to our target bird, the hermit warbler.
We had to drag ourselves away from birds that most of us just don't get to
see very often.

By the way, our worries about logging truck encounters proved groundless. We
met one truck the whole day. By going on a Monday, we also managed to avoid
most of the notorious dirt-bikers who litter the area on weekends. We did
see and hear a few motorbikes, and they truly were as annoying as could be,
adding to the frustration of not getting good looks at our birds. But when
we hit our hermit seventh heaven, we did so in blessed stillness.

If you want to share in the glory of our experience, just follow the
directions in "Birding in Washington"; they are excellent.

Here's everything we saw (and heard) on our trip, including a brief jaunt to
the parking lot and headquarters of Nisqually (we being too hot and tired to
walk any further there) (note that others on the trip may have seen more
birds that I have missed here):

American bittern (Nisqually)
great blue heron (on the drive down)
turkey vulture
wood duck (Nisqually; with babies!)
bald eagle (on the drive down)
redtailed hawk
Virginia rail (Nisqually; heard)
rock pigeon
band-tailed pigeon
rufous hummingbird
northern flicker (Nisqually)
olive-sided flycatcher
willow flycatcher
Pacific-slope flycatcher (heard)
warbling vireo
Hutton's vireo
Steller's jay
American crow
tree swallow (Nisqually)
violet-green swallow
cliff swallow (Nisqually)
barn swallow (Nisqually)
chestnut-backed chickadee
red-breasted nuthatch
Bewick's wren (heard; Nisqually)
winter wren (heard)
golden-crowned kinglet
western bluebird
Swainson's thrush
American robin
varied thrush
European starling
cedar waxwing
orange-crowned warbler
yellow warbler (heard;Nisqually)
hermit warbler
MacGillivray's warbler
Wilson's warbler
western tanager
spotted towhee
song sparrow
white-crowned sparrow
dark-eyed junco
black-headed grosbeak
red-winged blackbird
brown-headed cowbird
purple finch
American goldfinch
evening grosbeak
house sparrow - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com