Tweets - what a difference a week makes! We had a glorious, bird-filled day
today, in extreme contrast with last week. It was cold and foggy to start,
but the fog was thin and there was no wind. The sun flirted with us for the
first 3 hours before the fog finally burned off revealing pretty much
cloudless blue skies. Never really got warm, though.

The morning started with a Cooper's Hawk on the fence just as we got to the
weir - as we were watching it, a Merlin flew overhead and landed on one of
its favorite perches. Those were two of the 6 species of raptor we had. We
had a Sharpie in the Cottonwood Forest, a Bald Eagle, and many sightings of
Red-tailed Hawk, including the very cooperative juvenile several times.

The bigger excitement was the BRANT goose with hundreds of CACKLING GEESE
*inside* one of the baseball fields in the northeast corner of the park.
What the heck was it doing there? Congrats to Mark and Lee Crawford for
predicting Brant as one of the "next birds for Marymoor" (I thought they
were nuts when they nominated that one).

Highlights:

BRANT New bird for the park
Green Heron Juvenile at the Rowing Club
Northern Harrier North end of the East Meadow
MERLIN Two sightings, one early, one late
Anna's Hummingbird First sighting since late October
N. SHRIKE One east of East Meadow, one at Rowing Club
Townsend's Warbler One northeast of the mansion
Fox Sparrow Numerous, in large groups - maybe 20 overall
"Slate-colored" Junco Female at Compost Piles

At the Rowing Club we had the 3 RIVER OTTERS again.

For the day, 56 species.

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http://www.marymoor.org/birding.htm
== http://www.marymoor.org/BirdBlog.htm
== birdmarymoor at verizon.net