Hi Tweeters,

Had a nice Eastside Audubon Field Trip today.? Original intent was Kent but my small group wanted to try for the Black-tailed Gull so we birded Kent by way of Commencement Bay.? We had no luck with the gull but ran into a boatload of birders, presumably on Shep's boat.? They said the gull was seen at 8am.? Some of us saw a suspicious young gull with black in the tail in flight but it turned out to not be THE gull.? The Barrow's Goldeneyes are back in large groups.? We saw a lot of the usual suspects for this spot birdwise but no Western Grebe.? We also saw an unexpected out of place Dall's Porpoise in close, between the log boom and shore.? It would surface and stay surfaced for a relatively long timeperiod making us suspect it might have gotten into some sort of trouble with the wild weather or a boat.

In Kent off of W Valley near Smith Brothers Farm we saw our first Trumpeter Swans of the season, 7 of them.? A Northern Harrier worked this field too.? After checking a couple of other known Scrub Jay places we found a young but molting Western Scrub Jay along the warehouses east of 64th st near the powerline trail. The trail was flooded so we drove the warehouses.? The Scrub Jay was very gray but had the white eyebrow and some blue on the top of the head.

The grassy knoll was a great stop with many common ducks but also 2 Redheads and about 4-5 Canvassbacks.? On 212th street before it turns into Orillia Rd there was a huge flock of mostly Cackling Geese, many, many hundreds of birds.? A flock of about 20 American Pipets was here too, along with ducks and blackbirds.? Just as were driving away a dark raptor started working the flock, most likely a Peregrine Falcon.?

Boeing Ponds had a young, fairly naiive Northern Shrike which was close to us when found by Paula and then flew even closer for killer observation. Then further around we saw a Peregrine Falcon perched on the stairs on the side of the Boeing Building. To top it off an adult Northern Shrike was found perched up near our car by Tricia on the return of the loop walk.

Then we drove Frager N of 212th and up 206th (I believe is the the name). There is now decent amound of water here and a fair number of waterfowl which included an Eurasian Wigeon. Frager road both north and south of 212th is severely affected by the sandbagging effort on the Green River.

We ended at Tukwila Ponds to see Ruddy Ducks and got diverted by the many Yellow-rumped Warblers that seem to really like this park but we did get to see the Ruddy's too.

A nice trip with much better weather than yesterday. We ran into Carol Schulz along the way and she said her Intro to Birding Class field trip for Rainer Audubon was yesterday and that it was truly miserable weatherwise.

Kathy
Roosting in Kent, near Lake Meridian
(chukarbird at yahoo dot com)
Any driving directions contained within this message are given as a courtesy, beware, author is directionally challenged and will not vouch for them.