Just returned from the Gray's Harbor Shorebird Festival. What an
exhilerating experience that was! Finding the identification of
shorebirds so difficult, I signed up for the beginners identification
lecture, led by Matt Pike, and took the Beginners' tour with him and
Rachel Lawson.

The class was excellent (and so was the tour) with very usable tips on
how to distinguish groups of shorebirds (plover, sandpipers, culews, and
godwits) and then the individual species within those groups. And when
we went to the Harbor for the tour, there were tens of thousands of
birds there for us to practice! And I am not kidding about how many
birds there were. The sight was unreal! The sun even shone some of the
time, and when a Peregrin Falcon disturbed the birds, their leaving was
like a ripple of water through the air as the sun reflected from all
those white feathers!

One of the nicest parts of the day was the friendly cheerfulness of
everyone involved from the administrators to the vendors to the other
birders--even when things did not go exactly as planned.

On the tour, I saw thousands of birds, obviously, but I was able to
identify personally the Dunlins (there were thousands of them!!), a few
Semi-palmated Plovers, some Western Sandpipers, a Greater Yellowlegs,
and a Red Knot (although I was the only one in our group who saw it, so
that's unconfirmed). Also, saw two Gulls, Turkey Vultures, Ravens,
Red-tailed Hawks, and the Peregrine Falcon and heard Marsh Wrens singing
in the wetlands alongside the trail at the Refuge.

The Refuge did not seem crowded (with people, I mean), but when I
returned home, one of my friends called to tell me I should go to Grays
Harbor tomorrow to see the tens of thousands of migrating shorebirds!
He and his wife had been there at the Refuge all afternoon today--on the
same trail that our tour took at the same time! ((Besides what I
identified, they saw some Dowitches)

Darlene
Cinebar

Darlene

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong which is
but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was
yesterday. --Alexander Pope