Hello, tweeters.

Netta and I had a great trip to Burns and Malheur Refuge over
Memorial Day weekend. I can't rave about that area enough from the
standpoint of a Washington birder. There are so many more birds than
we can find in the interior of our own state, where conditions for
wildlife never stop deteriorating. There is a drought this year, very
different from the high water levels of last year, but there are
still a lot of birds. Sadly, one reason you see so many White-faced
Ibises and Franklin's Gulls everywhere there is because they
refrained from breeding this year because of low water levels and are
out a-wandering. That's presumably why so many ibises are in
Washington, but apparently the gulls don't disperse this far.

Rarities were being found on a daily basis at Malheur, and we were
lucky enough to see a young male Summer Tanager and a mature male
Baltimore Oriole that were there. Most people said the eastern
vagrants were "slow" this year. But the common birds down there make
it a superb birding experience. So many avocets and stilts and
curlews and Willets and snipes and more Wilson's Phalaropes than I've
ever seen before. We estimated 500 phalaropes on the sewage ponds
just east of the huge storage buildings (used to be full of wood) in
Hines. 100+ Red-necked Phalaropes still present on May 27 at the
Narrows. The blackbird family is thriving there, with lots of
Bobolinks along the road west of Diamond, prodigious numbers of
Yellow-heads around Burns, and orioles everywhere.

Lots of mammals, too. It seems to me Pronghorns are more common every
year we go down there, and unlike our small ground squirrels in
Washington, the Belding's in Oregon are flourishing. The interior of
Oregon is undergoing a development boom, but natural habitats still
dominate.

We saw a pair of Eurasian Collared-Doves at the Summer Lake Wildlife
Viewing Area north of Summer Lake, Lake County - just across the
street from the Summer Lake Lodge. I don't know the status of this
species in that area.
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net



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