Subject: [Tweeters] Lesser Black-backed Gull at Lake Lenore
Date: Apr 23 20:44:24 2006
From: Dennis Paulson - dennispaulson at comcast.net


Netta and I got photos of an almost-adult Lesser Black-backed Gull at
the south end of Lake Lenore (where Doug Schonewald found it the week
before) on Saturday, 22 April. Quite a thrill, as I had never seen
one in Washington before and I really hadn't expected that one to be
still around. The second-most exciting birds of the day were two
pairs of crows at Vantage. When I came here in 1967, there were no
crows in the Columbia Basin. In the 70s, they started showing up in
the Othello area, and now they're locally common there, but I had
never seen any between Kittitas and Dodson Road until yesterday. Two
Western Kingbirds just west of Dodson Road on Frenchman Hills Road
were fairly early migrants, but the winds were terrible all day long,
keeping passerines down on the ground. The Grand Coulee Lakes were
full of scaups and Buffleheads in migration, and little flocks of
California Gulls were constantly moving north along that chain of
lakes, from high overhead to right over the water. There were 14
American Avocets and 3 Dunlins at Soap Lake and more stilts (ca 30)
than I've ever seen before at "Birders Corner" at Dodson and
Frenchman Hills. Very few Yellow-headed Blackbirds on territory yet,
but we saw some flocks of migrants.

Dennis
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20060423/c2a363b1/attachment.htm