Subject: [Tweeters] Mount St. Helens birding
Date: Sep 27 21:21:04 2004
From: Gary Wiles - wilesharkey at yahoo.com


Tweeters, I did a little birding at Mount St. Helens this weekend while
doing an overnight backpacking trip to the northeastern side of the
mountain (in northwestern Skamania County). We hiked from the Windy Ridge
interpretive site to the Plains of Abraham on Saturday and then back to
Windy Ridge via Pumice Plain on Sunday. As might be expected, the birding
was rather slow most of the time because of the largely barren landscape,
but we did end up with 20 species, including several notable ones. Many
of the species were recorded in the small grove of fir and shrubby alder
at Pumice Butte.

5 Red-tailed hawk
1 Northern harrier
1 Peregrine falcon seen on the west side of Windy Ridge
1 Prairie falcon seen north of Windy Pass
1 Northern pygmy owl perched in a fir tree in bright morning sunshine
on Pumice Butte
5 Violet-green swallow
8 Common raven
2 Red-breasted nuthatch
2 Winter wren
5 Golden-crowned kinglet
3 Ruby-crowned kinglet
1 Townsend's solitaire
75+ American robin
1 Varied thrush
5 Yellow-rumped warbler
8 White-crowned sparrow
100+ Golden-crowned sparrow most common bird of the weekend. Several
flocks of 20-40 birds seen in shrubby alder patches.
2 Cassin's finch
30 Pine siskin

We also saw 4 mountain goats and had several elk bugling off and on during
the night to complete a great weekend.

Gary Wiles
Olympia, WA
wilesharkey at yahoo.com




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