Hi Everyone,

Dennis Paulson led a field trip for this year's Master Birder class to Blaine-Semiahmoo-Samish Flats today. It was a fantastic trip, with some great photo ops that I will post after working through the images. However, adding to Charlie Wright's report of the juvenile GYRFALCON, our group had an absolutely amazing show put on by this particular bird.

Around perhaps 3:45 to 4:00, we stopped near the north end of Bayview-Edison Road to check out a raptor in a tree when one of our group looked on the east side of the road and said, 'I think I see a falcon on the ground out there.' As we were setting up to scope it, a harrier dived at it and it took flight - unfortunately directly away from us. The color and other aspects of it were not right for a Peregrine and because it was a relatively light brownish on the upperparts, we first thought it might have been the PRAIRIE FALCON we had seen at the West 90 earlier. The bird landed in a quite distant tree, partially obscured by branches. We had multiple scopes on it and Dennis and Marv Breece studied it intently and suspected Gyr. Then it flew and we were almost certain it was a Gyr. It did a wide hunting circle and then landed in a tree right by the farmhouse on Sullivan Road, the same location as Charlie reported seeing it. We drove closer, it stayed put, and sure enoug!
h - we
had great views of a perched juvenile Gyr. But that was only the beginning...

The Gyr made three hunting loops over the 15-20 minutes or so we watched it, always returning to the same perch and allowing great scope views. (A poor camera image - handheld from a distance - is at the following link http://www.tubbsphoto.com/-/tubbsphoto/detail.asp?photoID=5582650&cat=38975.) This would have been great enough except two of its hunting forays involved some amazing interaction with a coyote. The bird flew from the perch to maybe 15 feet off the ground, and then starting diving on something in the brush. The something on the ground turned out to be a coyote, whose head we could see above the grass. Apparently the coyote had a kill and the Gyr was trying to scare the coyote off. Actually possible? Goofy juvenile lack of common sense? Who knows, but the diving kept up for quite some time and at one point the coyote leaped at the Gyr and tried to grab it, eliciting excited yells from everyone in our group. The bird never came up with anything and the c!
oyote w
andered off, not carrying anything that we could see, so what exactly prompted the diving we don't know.

On the final hunting foray we watch, the Gyr flushed some ducks from a nearby field and went after an airborne mallard, clearly making contact with it in midair, but not sufficiently to bring the bird down or grab it securely. Not too long after this the bird flew to the north and we lost it.

Even without the coyote and mallard episodes, we got great, long looks at the bird's flight and hunting style - and a wonderful chance to observe its massive and different structure than the other falcons.

We missed out on a 5-falcon day, but only by one. We had Peregrine (Semiahmoo), Prairie (West 90), Gyr (Sullivan Road) and American Kestrel (further south on Best Road). The light ran out before we found a Merlin...but nobody was complaining!

John Tubbs
Snoqualmie, WA
johntubbs at comcast.net
www.tubbsphoto.com