I decided there were some sorry-looking holes in my bird lists (both
year and life) and designated today as a day for plugging a few....

My main target was the coast, but I made a quick stop at Vance Creek
County Park at 8am to find the pair of redheads. They were in the
northeast part of the eastern pond, accompanying a small number of
greater scaup, with a few common mergansers hanging around too.

At Bottle Beach, I got out of the car and turned my binos on the white
blob I saw as I pulled up, expecting a plastic bag - it couldn't be that
easy, could it? Apparently it could, because the blob was the
white-tailed kite sitting on a snag in the field to the right of the
trail as you walk to the beach, a couple of hundred feet away. It didn't
do anything the entire time I watched it, just tipped its head from side
to side as it peered into the grass.

Bottle Beach also solved my issue of this year's duck on dunlins, in the
predictable flood of many hundreds of them, with thirty or so
black-bellied plovers mingled in. Other than that, it was mainly gulls
around as the tide receded - mew, ring-billed, hybrids, a couple dark
enough to be pure westerns. A ring-billed gull with no mirrors on its
primaries was trying to convince me it was a kittiwake, but this wasn't
the site I had them on the list for.

I flushed a Wilson's snipe from the roadside ditch walking down Ocosta
Third Avenue. Many song sparrows everywhere earning their name and
collecting nesting material. The kite was still in exactly the same spot
when I left, an hour and a half after I first laid eyes on it.

I followed the advice of someone here a few days ago and went to the
beach at Warrenton Cannery Road in North Cove to look for snowy plovers.
At this point the birds stopped being so cooperative, and all I added to
the day list was a bald eagle and 38 sanderlings.

On to the marina in Westport - here I *was* hoping for kittiwakes, but
they were a no show. Not that I stayed too long, since there was a
miserably cold and fairly strong wind, and it was starting to rain.
Plenty of gulls again, abundant surf scoter, twenty or so pigeon
guillemots all in summer fashion and three common loons still wearing
the winter look. One pelagic cormorant diving intermittently very close
in gave a good show of its details.

Back all the way around the harbour to the north side, and a visit to
Ocean Shores. The jetty was being beaten by some fairly vigorous waves
on both sides, and it was starting to rain again. I clambered around a
little on top, but a consideration of the time it would take me to
search the whole thing and the birds I might find vs time spent
elsewhere caused me to leave. More gulls, more cormorants, more surf
scoters, and a place to search on a less inclement day for little
rock-lovers. I was starting to think the morning had used up all my bird
luck....

The next stop was Damon Point, and finally things were looking up - an
elderly lady I met who was just leaving told me she'd seen one of the
snowy owls I'd missed at Boundary Bay and at Blaine. She tried to tell
me where she'd seen it, but her directions were so vague, I think I'd
have been better off not asking. After wandering the length of the point
for a while trying to work out what she'd meant, I finally found an owl
beyond the pond, sitting behind a driftwood log inland from the south
beach. Maybe it wasn't the same owl she saw - if it was, it had moved.
There were a number of western grebes off the tip of the point.

As I was almost back at the car, a second winter glaucous gull flew over
and landed on the north beach. Those people who told me I couldn't miss
one when I saw one weren't wrong. Its brilliant white in flight caught
the corner of my eye from a hundred yards away. It paddled and dabbled
about in the waves with its bicoloured bill - I did check to make sure
it wasn't a leukistic freak of another species!

I'd planned to do the Brady Loop in the way home to look for glaucous
gulls after recent reports, and I stuck with the plan in hope of finding
closer views of one, amenable to photography. In the end, I saw very few
gulls of any kind around the loop, maybe twenty in total. One could have
been a first winter glaucous, but it's tricky to tell looking almost
straight up at a backlit bird from a moving car. There was a
pond/flooded field to the west of Foster Road near the north end with
many ducks - pintail, shoveler and mallard among a large crowd of
wigeon, including at least one Eurasian male.

I found no swans at the intersection of Keys and Wenzel Slough roads. I
followed Wenzel Slough a couple of miles and checked a group of 10
trumpeter swans in one of the flooded fields, but there was nobody with
even a hint of yellow on the bill. There were swans in a field north of
one farm close to Keys Road, but they were hidden from view by buildings
except from the main highway 12, which would be a bad place to stop to
scope distant swans. There were 20 or so swans in that field, they might
have been the right group, but I'll never know.

13.5 hours, 380 miles, 6 species for the year list including 3 life
birds. Not a bad day, despite the rain showers!

Louise Rutter
Kirkland

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