needed to run over to west seattle this morning, and ended up birding from
lincoln park to seacrest...

at lincoln park, the stars of the show were three: a female cooper's hawk
(mid-park), a red-breasted sapsucker just a few feet off the ground
(mid-north), and a squirrel who has seen better days (his tail had been
through the mill, with only skin and bones along a lengthy strip)... the
sapsucker (or another) had been torturing this tree, mostly around the base,
for what appeared to be quite some time, with precise holes in precise
rows... also seen were golden-crowned kinglets ground-feeding (once again,
i'm surprised), bushtits, and both chickadees, mostly near the beach
trail...

further up the coastline, about a mile short of constellation park, a pair
of harlequin ducks was floating by, and not far behind a pair of ruddy
ducks...

at constellation, more ruddies, one harlequin, one bufflehead, one (i think)
goldeneye, and a (sp) cormorant on rocks i'd never seen before... extreme
low tide? as for the goldeneye, the light was in the worst place, and what
i saw wasn't the head of a barrow's, but i didn't see enough white plumage
to be a common... i thought it might be a surf scoter, but what little i
did see of the beak didn't seem to be the protuberance i normally
associate... surprisingly, no brant were visible; i rarely visit this spot
without seeing a few during the winter...

at alki itself, mostly gulls of various parentage, pigeons of various names,
and starlings a-plenty, though there were a few western grebes on the water,
one flyby of a juvenile eagle (towards downtown), and a flock of surf
scoters on the wing (headed west)...

at seacrest park, western grebes here and there, a small number of
red-breasted mergansers, red-necked grebes, and horned grebes... a flock of
15-20 lesser scaup were in a northbound flyby...

as usual, there are photos on the website from today's expedition in Photos
of the Month. Not as many as I'd like, because I stupidly forgot to check
the ISO setting for the camera, and so Stupid (that's me) deleted even more
photos today than normal...

Yeah, i know... :)

00 caren
http://www.parkgallery.org
george davis creek, north fork


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