Hi Tweets,

Heather and I took advantage of Turkey Day at Lake Chelan to bird the
Waterville Plateau and the Columbia River on Nov 28 & 29. We were lured
with promises of sunshine, but the plateau was in true winter form with the
cloud deck being the same elevation as the plateau. Throughout the day it
would rise just enough to see several hundred yards and then it would
settle back down like a nice down comforter.

November 28: Lake Chelan to Chelan Falls Park (which is being totally
redone - lots of heavy machinery had re-done the entire riverbed to
increase salmon habitat) across the Beebe bridge to Daroga Park to
Waterville & Cemetery, South Jameson Lake. Backtracked and went down
Meadow/Moses Coulee road to 24 NW and south on Palisades Road down Moses
Coulee, Rock Island Dam and back to Chelan.

November 29: Lake Chelan across the Beebe Bridge and north up the canyon to
the Plateau to Mansfield & Cemetery, North Jameson Lake (& Grimes Lake),
Central Ferry Canyon, Bridgeport Bar (Moe Road boat launch) and back to
Chelan.

Lake Chelan: HARLAN'S HAWK across from house #3577 on the road to Manson.
Beautiful chocolate brown bird with a white bib and chocolate spots. Head
had white spotting on chocolate brown. Tail was the cool looking all white
feathers with smudges and patterns of gray - a beautiful bird.

Chelan Falls Park: Barrow's and Common Goldeneye, Common Mergansers

Daroga Park - the bay just south on the Columbia: EARED GREBE, Canvasback,
1000's of coot, 60 Ruddy Duck, 20 Greater Scaup, along with Lesser Scaup

South Jameson Lake: missed seeing any rosy-finches, but added some Northern
Pintail to my county list. Lake frozen over about 1/3 of the way.
Canvasback, wigeon, gadwall, ring-necked duck.

Rock Island Dam: Western Grebe upstream from the dam. The security folks
were concerned that I was taking pictures, so you might want to look
upstream a bit further.

North Jameson Lake & Grimes Lake: 4 TUNDRA SWANS, GREEN-WINGED TEAL, 2
WESTERN GREBES, canvasback, redheads and ruddy ducks. On the return and
especially as we got closer to Mansfield we saw a total of 6 ROUGH-LEGGED
HAWKS - 2 male, 3 females and a dark morph male.

Mansfield: 15 EURASIAN COLLARED-DOVE about 2 blocks from the cemetery.
Great Horned Owl in the spruce.

Central Ferry Canyon: A lot of tromping around and quiet, quiet, quiet in
the riparian area. Not a single bird. Found a flock once we hit the
Ponderosa Pine belt of Steller's Jay, 20 Red-breasted Nuthatch and a
surprise WHITE-BREASTED NUTHATCH, 6 Red Crossbill.

Good Birding,

Marcus Roening
GSK - Critical & Supportive Care
Tacoma, WA
marcus.d.roening at gsk.com
C: (253) 988 8313