Hello Tweets,

This morning at 7am while checking our front yard for passerines a Least Flycatcher made a brief 3 minute visit to our large birch tree in our front yard,as it clearly showed a several distinctive field marks including relatively short primaries in relation to the fairly long tail,as well as a fairly large headed appearance and the fairly bright small bill that showed a definite orange-yellow cast to the entire length of the lower mandible. The bird called at least once and clearly gave a fairly dry "whit" call,which is much different to that of a Hammond's Flycatcher. The bird's overall plumage was fairly pale,as the bird remained very nervous and active by flicking both it's wings and ail a the same time. The wingbars showed a definite very pale buffy cast to them and the white eyering was complete and showed an even thickness. The bird favored near the canopy of the tree and returned to a favored perch at least 4 times before moving on and could not be relocated. This was our personal 1st Pierce Co. record,as well as a quality western WA species and a very nice yard bird adding to our 5th new yard bird for 2005!

A morning check of our front yard up until 8am proved very active,then slowing down at 8:15am with a few other species of note including the following with several species noted only as flyovers:

8 Band-tailed Pigeons
1 Violet-green Swallow
1 Pileated Woodpecker(heard only)
23 Am.Robins
8 Cedar Waxwings
4 Golden-crowned Kinglets
5 Ruby-crowned Kinglets
1 Yellow Warbler
2 Yellow-rumped Warblers
1 Western Tanager(heard only)
1 Am.Goldfinch

On a side note we encountered our very first of the fall season Varied Thrush in our backyard last Thursday evening(September the 15th),which also represented our earliest fall date for that species.


Good birding,

Ruth and Patrick Sullivan
Fircrest,WA
godwit at worldnet.att.net