On Sat, April 15 I encountered a Townsends Solitaire seeming quite content
perching in driftwood near Kalaloch and regularly, every 30 seconds or so,
flying 10 feet or so into the spume (foam left by the waves) to pick some
delectable morsel. I don't know if they were sand fleas or what. Is this
an unusual sighting? I have for 30 years, spent a lot of time near Kalaloch
on the North Coast. I have never before seen a Townsend's solitaire in this
area.



Also, at the mouth of the Queets I counted approximately 600 caspian terns
feeding on 4 to 6 inch salmon smolts (I assume they were Chinook salmon) and
it looked like although I could not be sure, an occasional surf smelt. The
salmon smolts were taken from the river about 300 feet before it meets the
ocean at a point where the bottom shallows dramatically and the current gets
stronger. I counted 2.5 successful dives per minute where a tern caught a
smolt over a period of a half an hour on a mid-tide. That ends up to be a
lot of salmon. The smelt, if that's what they were, were caught from the
ocean side in the shallows between breaking waves. There were also 5 or 6
immature bald eagles and 2 species of cormorants feeding on the smolts.



Chris Maynard

Olympia