Ray,

Thanks for your posting. The number of Western Grebes you saw in Penn Cove is good news for bird lovers these days. I'd heard that the number of WEGRs these days is very low compared to formerly, so I consulted Birds of Washington and found historical records for Western Grebes that show a very different picture as recently as a half-century ago: more than 50,000 in Admiralty Inlet in May 1957 and 40,000 reported in Bellingham Bay in February 1969. I suppose all the activities of a population around Puget Sound that has grown so dramatically since the 1950s has affected the ability of the water to support these -- and other -- animals in their former numbers.

Paul Webster
Seattle
paul.websterATcomcast.net


----- Original Message -----
From: Ray White
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Sent: Saturday, March 31, 2007 10:03 AM
Subject: [Tweeters] Western Grebe rafts, Penn Cove, Whidbey Island


March 30, about 2 p.m. -- Two large rafts of Western Grebes in Penn Cove. Seen from Madrona (Drive?). One raft contained roughly 420-450 birds (estimate made by counting 30 on one side, then sequentially applying the area that they covered as a template on the rest of the raft. The other raft appeared to be of about the same size.

A recent Tweeters posting lamented poor abundance of Western Grebes in Puget Sound this spring, compared with previous years. Do my observations of rafts off Seattle's Discovery Park (about 350 birds in total) on March 28 and the rafts in Penns Cove (800-900 birds in total) change that impression? Of course, these could have been the same flocks, which had moved 70 miles north and maybe picked up more birds. Are the flocks still present at Discovery Park?

Ray White
Edmonds, WA
425-672-8268