Hello, tweets.

I led a group to Ridgefield NWR and the Woodland bottoms on Friday,
Sep 18, for the WOS convention. It was a great day, with good people
and lots of birds (including a Lark Sparrow and a Vesper Sparrow at
Ridgefield), but the most exciting thing to me was the movement of
Western Scrub-Jays. We saw bird after bird flying long distances well
above the treetops (even the tallest cottonwoods), sometimes several
in a line. Never more than a few in one place, but they seemed to be
everywhere. This is a bird the flight of which looks much too labored
and difficult to do such a thing, but to me they were obviously
dispersing cross-country. I have seen Steller's Jays doing this every
fall since I moved to Washington, but I hadn't seen the same
phenomenon in scrub-jays before, and it was very impressive.

This is perhaps what some of the birds were doing that have been
reported from the Seattle area lately. It is presumably immature birds
that engage in these dispersal flights, but I don't know if there are
any data to test that hypothesis. And I should add that members of the
californica subspecies group (including all those on the Pacific
coast) are thought to be strictly sedentary.
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net



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