Tweets,



After a silent winter, day before yesterday I heard our local Barred Owl
hooting. Surprisingly, a Western Screech immediately joined the chorus with
a ten-note slightly accelerating series of toots, which he has been
repeating quite tirelessly since. I heard the Barred again last night,
followed shortly again by the Screech, which seems odd given that Barred
Owls like to eat screechies. I tracked down the Screech last night and found
him singing from inside a tall snag! All he needs now is a female and to
escape the Barred's attention.



The Barred Owl has been a regular in the ravine and woods near my house in
Lake Forest Park for the past four or five years and has nested successfully
at least once or twice in that time. The Western Screech has visited twice
before, each time tooting beginning in late February and continuing for a
week to ten days, then disappearing, apparently for want of a mate. I missed
him last year however.



On another issue, I've been meaning to post a question about the recent
rearrangements of the sequence of shorebirds and gulls in the latest
Washington State checklist. At first I thought it was an editorial oversight
but apparently not:



1) The Willet is now sandwiched between Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs,
and

2) The Western Gull is torn from his familiar moorings beside the
Glaucous-winged and stuck between Ring-billed and California.



I've tried to imagine an evolutionary scenario that would make sense of this
but find it a stretch. Does anyone know the rationale behind these moves? No
doubt some weird DNA thing, but how could Western Gulls not be closest kin
to Glaucous-winged, given that they so freely hybridize?





Gene Hunn

18476 47th Pl NE

Lake Forest Park, WA

enhunn323 at comcast.net