Hope someone local will follow up on this. You never know till you
know.

Would be a very yummy find.

Larry Schwitters
Issaquah
On Apr 30, 2010, at 9:10 AM, judy wrote:

> Forwarded
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Thomas Love" <tlove at linfield.edu>
> Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 7:26 AM
> To: <obol at oregonbirds.org>
> Subject: [OBOL] White Wagtail - Bonneville Dam?
>
>> I know, weird... But on a class fieldtrip Th afternoon, 29 April,
>> as we drove in the entrance frontage road about 3:00 for a tour of
>> the Washington side of Bonneville Dam, about halfway from the
>> turnoff from Hwy. 14 back east to the entrance check station, on
>> the left in the wide, low grass strip, a very gray and black slim
>> bird suddenly flushed from about 20 feet away (I was driving)
>> directly away to the left. It flushed from the grass in a quick
>> bound. My immediate thought was Loggerhead Shrike, given the mix
>> of colors and the season/location, but immediately it was clear it
>> was not only slimmer and smaller but also behaviorally all wrong,
>> and of course the habitat was highly improbable. I couldn't stop,
>> and besides the bird had flown and would have taken more time than
>> I could have stolen from the trip to pursue it.
>>
>> I've been turning this over and over in my mind ever since, and
>> though I'm somewhat hesitant even to report such a brief sighting,
>> there are so few candidates for what this bird might have been that
>> I thought it might be worth running up the flagpole. Maybe Wilson
>> or someone can get up there today to check this.
>>
>> Weather conditions: sun break between heavy showers, light from SW
>> (behind and left, I was looking north). Single bird, flushed
>> rather explosively from short mown grass strip as described above.
>>
>> Description: slim, sparrow-sized (6-8 inches?) lone bird,
>> primarily black tail, gray back, wings mix of black/gray/white but
>> the overall impression was very black on tail and gray on back.
>> Seemed slim for a sparrow. Window was up so did not hear
>> vocalization if there was one.
>>
>> I kept trying to make this into a McCown's Longspur (equally odd),
>> given the color scheme, but it really was a shrike combination of
>> colors, and the tail wasn't longspur-like. The overall jizz is
>> wagtail. I can't think of another candidate that comes even
>> close. I have seen White Wagtail in Alaska, and am familiar with
>> several wagtail species in SE Asia.
>>
>> Could someone please forward this to Tweeters?
>>
>> Tom Love
>> tlove AT linfield DOT edu
>> 503-936-3172 cell
>> -------------- next part --------------
>> An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
>> URL: <http://oregonbirds.org/pipermail/obol_oregonbirds.org/attachments/20100430/ae11c540/attachment.html
>> >
>> _______________________________________________
>> OBOL mailing list
>> OBOL at oregonbirds.org
>> http://oregonbirds.org/mailman/listinfo/obol_oregonbirds.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tweeters mailing list
> Tweeters at u.washington.edu
> http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/tweeters