Subject: [Tweeters] Kettle Valley Songbird Festival
Date: May 23 16:57:36 2005
From: Carol Riddell - cariddell at mac.com


Hi Tweets,

I'll add my two cents about the weekend's songbird festival by saying first,
it was great and the folks of the Highlands Bird Group and their supporters
should be proud of putting on such a great festival. For those of you who
don't know about the festival, it just concluded its third year. This was
my first time to attend and I now regret that I didn't attend the first two.
The people of Ferry County were as welcoming as they could be. That means a
lot after you have spent a minimum of six hours on the road to get there
from the wet side of the mountains. That doesn't count all of the birding
stops you make coming and going. I went along with five other members of
Pilchuck Audubon and we birded the west side of Highway 20 so long that we
hit snow at Washington Pass around 4 p.m. last Friday. We gave up the plan
to look for Pine Grosbeaks at the pass and headed down to Winthrop quickly.
We went over Loup Loup Pass and stopped at the campground to do more
birding. The long and the short of it was that we finally pulled into
Republic around 10:30 p.m., having missed Andy Stepniewski's 7 p.m. talk on
Birding in the Okanogan Highlands. Oh well. Maybe we can pace ourselves
better next year.

The two highlights of the festival were the Great Gray Owl on her nest box
and the chicks in the Golden Eagle nest. It was my understanding that the
Great Gray Owl is on Okanogan National Forest land, rather than private
property. But you'd never find the nest just wandering on your own. That's
a good thing for the owls. My day-tour group saw the nest box around noon
on Saturday. At first we just saw a lump of gray feathers but with some
patience she finally raised her head and stared directly at us. It was
thrilling to watch through the scope. I did not see the Golden Eagle nest
but members of our group who did see the two eaglets said it was an awesome
experience.

Several of us opted not to attend the lectures Saturday afternoon in order
to head back to the Aeneas Valley Road in Okanogan County to see the
Bobolinks. There were at least 7-9 of them, quite active in the field and
even perching on the fence posts where we had excellent observations.

Probably the best part of this event for me was that birders opened their
properties to give us leisurely, guided tours. The tours covered a variety
of highlands habitat and yielded birds that we might not have seen just
birding the public sites in Ferry County. If you want to be sure you hear
about this small but very well put together festival next year, send an
email to loosebluemoose at hotmail.com and ask to be added to their mailing
list.

The Ferry County folks deserve a huge thanks for all of their work on the
festival and for their efforts to make birding their neck of the woods just
a little easier.

Carol Riddell
Edmonds, WA