Hi Tweeters

I was inspired to great heights when I read Randy Hill's e-mail a short
time ago saying he had seen Cattle Egrets while doing waterfowl surveys
from an airplane over the Columbia NWR. We in Yakima County have been
waiting with great anticipation for our first Cattle Egret, so I hoped to
speed up the process by talking an acquaintance of mine into taking a group
of birders up in his plane for an egret search.

Ellen Stepniewski, Chris (my wife) and I went flying yesterday with Lynn
Buchanan in search of Cattle Egrets. We were up for 1 3/4 hours and
covered the Lower Yakima Valley fairly well. We went south over Ahtanum
Ridge, which is on the south side of Yakima, at about Brownstown, passed to
the west of Harrah and worked our way east, going to the county line east
of Grandview.

It was surprising how few cattle there were grazing in pastures. Most of
the land is cropland, vineyards or orchards. A vast majority of the cattle
we saw were in stockyards. Most of the white things we saw in pastures
with cattle were sprinklers or white pipes protecting sprinklers. There
were also many cows or steers with white faces, which raised our hopes
until we figured that out.

We spotted four swans on the south pond at Zimmerman's, many Canada Geese
on ponds and the Yakima River, a male Northern Harrier hunting over a
field, and could even pick out magpies in flight. Ellen saw a Red-tailed
Hawk flying just below us. No Cattle Egrets, though.

It was a great flight and gave us a great look at the valley. I was
surprised to see how much water there is in the Lower Yakima Valley. There
were many large ponds I had never seen before. We flew over the Grandview
Sewage Treatment plant, Mosebar, Zimmerman's, the Satus WRA and several of
the Toppenish NWR tracts, all of which we have visited many times on the
ground.

I hope we can do this again the next time there is a Cattle Egret
invasion. I wish, though, we had done it several weeks earlier. As Andy
Stepniewski has said many times, we gathered lots of negative data.

Denny Granstrand


* Denny Granstrand *
* Yakima, WA *
* dgranstrand at charter.net *
* Denny's bird photos can be seen online at: *
http://granstrand.net/gallery/