Subject: Luhr Beach Thurston County 9/7
Date: Sep 7 23:38:46 2004
From: Jason Paulios - jpaulios at earthlink.net


Tweeters, Keith Brady and I stumbled upon yet another great Thurston County
bird today at Luhr Beach. At about 10:00 AM as the tide was coming in (and
was already fairly high) we noticed a pot-bellied, short-legged shorebird
standing amongst a few gulls. We moved over to the dock to try to get a
different vantage and noticed that the legs got a bit longer with the new
view so we were about to discount the bird as a Black-bellied Plover when it
decided to take off. We watched it fly (and call repeatedly) and noticed
that it was thinner winged than the expected BBellied and that it lacked any
black axillaries! Golden-plover! Luckily we decided to videotape me
mimicking the bird's call earlier and so the camera was running as the bird
called repeatedly and flew overhead. Keith was able to extract the clip and
send it to some folks for verification since it was a sound neither of us
knew. At least one source is saying it is good for AMERICAN GOLDEN-PLOVER
which makes for yet another code 5 bird in Thurston at Luhr. This was
probably a juvenile bird since we noticed no black from below. As I
followed this bird's flight in the scope I saw three other birds in the
background which seemed to have the same shape but I couldn't verify if
there was more than one bird since I stuck with this bird only.

Other good birds this morning:
9 Common Loon
4 Eared Grebe
12 Horned Grebe
Scaup species
3 Sanderling
1 MARBLED GODWIT (remaining from yesterday, Steve Nord had at least 3 today)
5 Phalarope species (most likely R/N)
15 Common Tern

I also got great looks at an adult Parasitic Jaeger yesterday from this
location.

Jason Paulios
Jpaulios at earthlink.net
Olympia, WA