My grandson Benny and I walked McLane Creek near Olympia yesterday, where our most interesting observation was a pair of Common Yellowthroats. The female's plumage puzzled me, though. No visible yellow on the breast, but clear yellow undertail coverts and surprisingly bright yellow streaks on the undersides of the tail feathers; none of my references on warblers show so much yellow in the tails of females. The male appeared several times with a bill full of stuff, which at first I took to be fluff for nest lining from the cattails disintegrating nearby, but they were surely collections of insects for feeding nestlings. (Ehrlich's Birder's Handbook says the female builds the nest but both sexes feed young.) Then the female appeared, also with a bill full of insects, and for a while they had a kind of dancing interaction; under other circumstances, I might have called it a mating dance, but since they apparently both had food for nestlings hidden in the reeds, the "dance" had more of this kind of feeling: "Oh, Percival, how wonderful that you have such a fine mouthful of food for our babies." "Oh, Gwendolyn, I see that you, too, have collected nutritious food for our little ones. Let us hurry away and feed them!" Please forgive my fantasy of a little drama, but I wonder if anyone has ever seen birds interacting in this way during feeding time. I might have expected Bent's Life Histories to mention such behavior, but they don't.

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu <mailto:guttmanb at evergreen.edu>
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503