Hey tweets, my younger son asked me the other day if I owned a
portrait of myself that I was keeping covered up somewhere, you know,
the kind of portrait that gets older and meaner every year while the
owner keeps looking the same?

Apparently, many of you out there might be wondering the same thing,
so let me clarify. In my previous post about my having Fill records
that go back to 1895, I "have" them in the sense that they are in my
files. I've been compiling all the records for the Fill as part of my
book. While I wish I personally went back as far as 1895 (imagine the
shorebirds that must have been in the Puget Sound Trough back
then!!!), alas. I'm old, but not that old.

Seriously, the records for the Fill began in 1895 because that's when
the University of Washington moved to its present campus. There were
some faculty back then who were very interested in ornithology and who
began keeping records of the birds they saw on campus. Every once in a
while, they would go down to Union Bay and see what was appearing
there. Those early records are thus pretty sporadic, although very
interesting.

Beginning in the 1930s, two faculty began to bird the Fill area by
canoe. At that time, parts of UBNA were an active landfill and garbage
dump, so the only way to bird it was from the water. Those two birders
wrote a wonderful book published in 1951: Union Bay: the Life of a
City Marsh (Higman and Larrison were the authors). They say in that
book that they formally reported their sightings to Seattle Audubon's
bird notes. The reports of birds they mention in their book are true,
but not systematically organized. I went through their book and
digitized their sightings. I understand that their more formal records
(i.e,. the ones from Seattle Audubon) are still archived somewhere in
the UW library system. I have to confess that I did not dig them out.
There is also an intriguing mention that Higman (I think) recorded his
sightings using movie film. Some day, I would like to make a search
for those films. Wouldn't it be great to see what Seattle birding
looked like back in the 1930s and 1940s?

After their book came out, records again appear to be sporadic. As
far as I can tell, no one systematically birded the site in the 1960s.
The Montlake Fill closed completely in 1971, and it's only after that
that birders began actively birding the site much as we do now.

I suspect that even with Tweeters so commonly used to record
sightings, and with WOS all set up to do so as well, some records
still get lost because individuals who see things don't always report
them. Olive-sided Flycatchers were probably a lot more common at the
Fill than the records suggest. For one thing, I think they actually
bred on upper campus when there was more old-growth forest there. Such
birds probably wandered down to the Fill area from time to time but
either weren't seen or weren't reported. Seeing one now is special
because all the old-growth on campus is gone and breeding stopped a
long time ago. So the bird that showed up today was a migrant - here
for a short time and then gone for good. - Connie