Tweeters,

On Sunday, June 5th, Bruce Labar and I located a Eurasian Collared-Dove in
Washtucna, which is in eastern Adams County off of Hwy 26. The bird was
calling repeatedly from a large 100' tree with a loud and fairly continuous
COO COO with Mourning Doves calling in counterpoint for comparison. We
never did locate it in the tree. At about 2:00pm, we located the bird
feeding underneath a bird feeder located one short block west of Hwy 260
(gravel road) and 1 1/2 blocks north of Sonny's cafe in the center of town.
There are two houses both feeding goldfinches, with sunflower and thistle
seeds. Sorry about not getting an address.

As for our original mission of looking for errant migrants, we had a bust.
After being lured to Washtucna with thoughts of multiple species of
warblers and neotropical migrants, our total warbler count was a single
Yellow Warbler, which we did get to see twice.:-) We suspect that the huge
rain front out of the southwest, pushed what few birds were left, onward.
One bird of note was a singing BEWICK'S WREN, north of Basset Park in the
large Popular trees.

The best behavior was a displaying Bullock's Oriole. The male would fan
its tail so that the tail was roughly 1/3 orange, 1/3 black and 1/3 orange
and tip it over its back past 90 degrees, at the same time it pushed its
wings forward displaying the wing coverts and then it repeatedly would lean
down and towards the female. I was quite impressed - I'm less sure about
the female's response.

In Othello, we had 7 American White Pelicans feeding in the Para Ponds.

Good Birding,

Marcus Roening
Tacoma, WA
marcus.d.roening at gsk.com