I played guide for friend Kurt, whose bird knowledge and experiences
blended nicely with mine to make for an excellent day of birding. It
was fun to share sightings, stories and info. Kurt did make a little
list of what we had seen and he did have a life bird (Peregrine
Falcon). We spent enough time at each stop to satisfy our interest in
really getting a good look at the birds we were seeing, to watch
behaviors, take pictures and to look up things in our bird books, as
well as talk with some of the birders and photographers we
encountered. As usual, I learned a bunch and saw and listened to some
wonderful birds. And the West 90 bullfrogs were quite entertaining as
well.

2 of the first 3 birds we stopped for, had injuries, which was sad to
see - a Lesser Scaup paddled around in a slough trailing a broken wing
around and an adult Cooper's Hawk with a constantly-spread tail made
us wonder and we discovered it's tail had quite a few feathers that
looked stripped of barbs (the feather pieces that are attached to the
shafts) as though the hawk had had an encounter with something that
ripped off the barbs. This hawk sat in a tree and did fly once to a
different branch, during the time we were watching it - its eyes
appeared to be a yellowish color (not red) but other indications were
that it was an adult (head shape, dark cap, rufous bars on it's
chest). For the first 5 minutes of the 10 we watched the Cooper's, an
adult Bald Eagle sat in a tree right next to the Cooper's, and both
seemed nonplussed that the other was there.

Luckily the injured birds were not a portent of how the rest of the
day would go. As we left the Cooper's Hawk site and started down the
hill leading into the flats, I spotted a familiar shape perched on a
dead portion of a Douglas Fir on the west side of Bayview Edison Rd.
Turned out to be a lovely light Merlin (or at least lighter than the
Black Merlin - it appeared lighter than my photos here may indicate),
who nicely posed for a good 5 minutes.

As we progressed onto the flats, we could see a lot of cars in the
distance, where the Dunlin Field is. It was almost high tide (10:10
a.m.) and the gang was there to watch the spectacle. We pulled up on
the west side of the road, a block or so behind the other cars, to
size up what was going on from a distance before immersing ourselves
in the action. What a propitious move that was - we just happened to
have pulled up under a wire on which an adult Peregrine was perched.
None of the folks ahead of us seemed to be noticing this bird, so we
drank in our golden opportunity for a close look, and sat in the car
and watched it, in no rush to get to the inactive-at-the-moment
Dunlin. Shooting through the windshield didn't give me the best
chance at good photos, but no matter - we could watch it and revel in
it's beauty and not scare it off by emerging from the car. This was
quite a treat.

After it flew, toward the Dunlins, we pulled up closer to the upcoming
action and watched this adult (we were told it was a male) fly right
into the Dunlin mass and cause the first flush for us that morning.
We got out of the car and joined the others to watch the hunting -
after the first Peregrine did its lateral swoop through the Dunlin,
catching nothing, another Peregrine appeared, coming in from across
the road and zooming through the Dunlin from the opposite end as the
first one had. Still no prey caught. The Peregrines retreated - one
went to perch on a utility pole along the road and the other
disappeared from our view. A juvenile Peregrine was said to be on a
post WAY off in the distance, somewhere in the east-side fields.

A bit farther up the road Kurt spotted Black-bellied Plovers (quite a
few) milling about in a marshy, grassy area. Also near the plovers
was a perched Rough-legged Hawk on a wire - I was able to get a few
decent shots of it. Kurt was getting pretty good at identifying
Roughlegs, as we had earlier spent some time looking at another in a
tree and looking at the field marks of this one, comparing them to
various photos of them in a field guide or two: football-shape, light
head, dark belly, mottled back and very distinctive eyes, a black
teardrop shape, with a black line drawn out behind each.

Off to West 90, where there was a noticeable dearth of either perched
or flying raptors. I think we only saw one Rough-legged Hawk, a Song
Sparrow or 2, four other birders with dejected looks on their faces,
and that was about it. Except for the belching bullfrogs, it was
pretty quiet (made doubly delightful by the lack of hunters' gunshots
- Waterfowl Hunting is over), so we only stayed about 5-10 minutes and
then moved on up to Samish Island, where a few Surf Scoters, Common
Loons, Red-necked Mergansers and a Spotted Towhee made the walk to the
bluff above the rocky beach worth having to endure the stench of a
chocolate lab's chocolate waste, deposited right next to us. No Long-
tailed Ducks were spotted there.

Off to Edison, seeing quite a few Trumpeter Swans and not stopping to
check for Tundra Swans. At the slough behind the bakery (Farm-to-
Market) we saw Green-winged Teal and a couple of Northern Pintail,
plus one Bald Eagle on the topped fir in the distance. No Merlins, so
we got ourselves the obligatory sweet treat and moseyed on down the
road, seeing lots more swans, a few Northern Harriers, quite a few
more Bald Eagles (mostly adults) and a good number of Red-tailed
Hawks, quite a few of them looking much like the adult Western Redtail
RT28 on page 94 of Wheeler & Clark's Photographic Guide to North
American Raptors. They had lovely creamy golden and rufousy breasts
with wonderful hounds-tooth belly band spots and a nice dark-brown
head hood, the reddish-orange tail flashing in the diminishing light
we had been enjoying during the middle of the day.

No exciting ducks at Bayview State Park, so on to a virtually-empty
'Seeds' in LaConner at 3 p.m. - they weren't having a Super-Bowl
party! Yea! So we enjoyed a leisurely, calm lunch and then dragged
ourselves back to the car, fighting that dozing feeling. Luckily our
next stop, North Fork Access on Rawlins Road on Fir Island (at about
4:30) got us energized again, as, after doing some serious looking for
a Short-eared Owl, Kurt spotted one perched on a driftwood stump and
we proceeded to have a marvelous time watching (and photographing) it
for some time (5-10 min.?), watching it get dozey itself, it's lids
starting to close over its golden eyes, opening them a bit, then
starting to close them again, several times over, never turning out
the lights totally while we were watching. Got photos, but they are
my typical low light/long distance digiscoped 'impressionistic'
shots. But you can tell they are Shortears!

The tip we got from Andy, an Eastside Audubon member we met up on the
North Fork Dike, made us beat a hasty exit from the tranquil owl scene
(which had been punctuated with the occasional high-pitched whistle of
a hunting female N. Harrier and a bit of eagle bleating). The pull of
two Great Horned Owls a'hooting at Wylie Slough was looking like a
great way to end our long and fruitful day. Sure enough, when we
arrived, a male and female were indeed calling back and forth,
initially from 2 trees just north of the tree in which I had seen a
nest last year. We spotted a large dark shape, which turned out to be
the male (smaller, higher-pitched call) and watched for a few minutes
until Kurt called out that the other one, the larger female, was
flying over us and off into the trees way to the west. I missed it as
I had concurrently seen the male turn to face me and I wanted to try
for a photo or two of that. My low-light camera setting did capture
the male, but they are light-challenged photos. When the parking lot
light came on at 5:35, neither owl was in view anymore. Groupings of
Trumpeters were still making their way out to the water as we walked
back to the car, ready to motor back to Seattle.

We never saw a single Snow Goose the whole day. I see from Hans
Feddern's post from Tues. that they were in short supply for him, too,
during the daylight, and that they seemed to be heading out to the bay
at night, as he saw them fly overhead by the thousands at about 5:30
p.m. from his vantage point out on the North Fork Access dike.
Perhaps we would also have seen them at that time, had we stayed on
the dike and hadn't headed to Wylie Slough. No regrets - the owls
provided a fabulous ending to a fine day of birding.

Barb

North Matthews Beach - Seattle

barbdeihl at comcast.net