Subject: [Tweeters] Christmas Bird Count on the bestest of days
Date: Dec 22 20:40:30 2009
From: Kelly McAllister - mcallisters4 at comcast.net


Gary Wiles and I spent our tenth Christmas Bird Count together in the McAllister Creek/Nisqually bottomlands south of I-5. It was the bestest of days (December 20th) because it defied all weather forecasts and didn't rain (until about 4:00 pm anyway). Plus, it reached somewhere around 56 degrees F (that was the high at the Olympia airport and my Prius was telling me it was even warmer in the bottoms). We saw a number of species that we haven't seen in the prior nine years doing this area:

Hermit Thrush
Savannah Sparrow
Greater Yellowlegs

We got some that we can't count on every year:

Peregrine Falcon
Mourning Dove
Northern Shrike
Western Meadowlark
Brown Creeper
Raven

We didn't get a single warbler, or a merlin, or Eurasian Collared Doves, or Pipits (we tried hard to find pipits).

Still, we ended up with 67 species which is the most we've gotten in our ten years doing this area on the CBC.

On this unusually warm day, we saw a busy honey bee hive and an ant hill that had a swarm of Starlings coming to it. We pulled up within 10 feet and a few of the Starlings were so intent on picking up ants and rubbing them on their underwings that they let us watch for a minute or so before deciding we were too scary to stick around.

Cheers,

Kelly McAllister
Olympia, Washington