Hi Tweets,

Over the weekend Larry and I birded twice at the auto tour at Ridgefield NWR, and on our Sunday trip there we found ourselves mystified and completely stumped in our efforts to identify a bird sound (we're assuming that it was a bird!) that we heard there. I'm hoping maybe someone here can help!

We first noticed the sound when we were walking on the short trail to the observation blind on the auto tour. The sound that we were hearing was rather haunting, creepy, eiree, disconcerting. (Think "Blair Witch Project" (which I never saw, actually) or some other equally creepy, haunting movie with something unknown teasing all around you in the dark - except that, thank goodness, it was a nice bright day! :) It was a sort of "wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh" or "woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo" (this is a pretty imperfect description - sorry) that seemed somehow to be cycling through the air around us and coming repeatedly closer. We were hearing the sound all around us and kept looking around trying to identify its source. The sound seemed to indicate movement, but all that we saw flying around us were various Swallows, nesting Starlings (yuck!), and Yellow-Rumped Warblers, none of which (to our knowledge or our Peterson CD) make this sound. It was like being surrounded by approaching ghosts or spirits - the sound consistently seemed to be coming rapidly closer, but as soon as we would whip around toward the apparent source location, it would be gone and nothing would visibly be there.

Stranger still, while at first the sound seemed to be occurring all over the place around us, after a few minutes the sound completely disappeared from that area.(?) It was weird enough to make me question whether I'd heard it at all (I did ask Larry once or twice and he confirmed that he'd heard it as well. :)

We later also occasionally heard the sound from our car while on the auto tour, though never as loud or with the same sense of its maker being so immediately near to us and/or "incoming!".

Does anyone have any idea what this might have been? I really want to resolve this mystery, but don't really even know where to start. Some sort of duck? Warbler? Hawk way high overhead? It definitely was coming from up at high tree level or above, so it wasn't like it was a frog or something.

Any help would be much appreciated!

We had excellent birding all weekend, btw, twice at Ridgefield and almost a full day on Sauvie Island, and got to add several birds to our life lists! I'll try to get around to posting a report later this week.

Thanks much and good birding!

~Christy Jobe
Kenmore, WA
christyrj_ at _hotmail_com