Subject: [Tweeters] Birds of the Week
Date: Jan 10 19:33:46 2006
From: Rob Conway - robin_birder at hotmail.com


First - Thanks to Kelly Cassidy for coming up with this great idea. I'm
going to fudge a bit a do week one and week two at the same time - I'm
playing catch up with e-mail.

Acorn Woodpecker - This is one of my 5 favorite birds. I grew up on a big
cattle ranch in the Sierra foothills (on the south end of the motherlode
between Mariposa and Coarsegold) and these birds were everywhere. They are
very vocal - and are probably the first bird I notice when I go home to
visit. They drink from the rainbird type sprinklers at my parents home -
and are very fun to watch. When I was a teenager someone brought a dead
frozen specimen to my high school and stuck the beak of the bird into the
vents of a locker next to the biology classroom. After the initial
screaming it was intended to induce the biology teacher took the bird and
used it in the classroom (always frozen) during discussions on local
ecology. These birds are very well studied on the Stanford campus as well -
there they use the relatively soft ends of the sawn off fronds of palm trees
to store their acorns - adaptable to many granary possibilities - our barns
were full of holes from those goofy guys.

American Coot - My most vivid memory of this bird involves self-same birds
demise by Perigrine only 20 feet from me at Gene Coulon Park in Renton - 100
birds beached and feeding and out of nowhere came the falcon - the coot had
no chance and the others scattered in an amazing burst of activity from what
I normally consider to be an almost cartoonishly plump and slow moving
creature. I continued to sit on my log and watched as the Perigrine ate the
breast of the coot and then flushed when someone with an off-leash dog came
out of the parking lot.

Bittern - I touched a bittern by accident! I worked for several years just
off of Lynd Avenue in Renton. Behind the buildings were a number of ditches
and wetlands that I would walk through and bird regularly. One day I was
watching a group of dabbling ducks and heard a splash off through the low
willows and cattails just to my left where a muskrat or nutria had gone into
the water - to get a better look I reached out to push aside the vegetation
and realized that I had actually brushed aside the neck of a petrified
bittern as well as the plants - we both jumped a mile and the bird shot
straight into the air brushing me with its wings as it took off - that was a
fantastic close encounter.



Rob Conway
Newcastle, WA

robin_birder at hotmail.com