Hello, tweets.

If you like ibises, you should get yourself down to Burns and Malheur NWR, Oregon, as soon as possible. Netta and I spent the weekend (5/28-5/30) in that area, and I have never seen so many White-faced Ibises in my life. There are surely thousands in the area. While driving along the central patrol road in Malheur, or anywhere around Burns, I don't think it's exaggeration to say there was never a time when ibises weren't in view, either feeding out in the grassy marshes (in flocks of up to a few dozen) or somewhere in flight (ditto). In the sun, they are nothing less than spectacular at close range, and they are so different from anything we see normally in Washington that even seeing the flocks at a distance is enjoyable (they are most like cormorants at a distance, but you see few cormorants with long, curved bills).

Franklin's Gulls are also especially abundant, another species we don't see much farther north. Flying overhead, feeding in the fields and marshes, bathing in the ponds, pretty much everywhere. In the right lighting, the rosy glow on the breast of some of them is breathtaking.

This last weekend started cold and windy there but was reasonably nice yesterday (Sunday). Because of very adverse conditions at higher elevation, I presume, there were hundreds of Western Tanagers in the lowlands. Driving anywhere through open areas, we flushed tanagers one after another from tiny copses of willows, including the narrow growth lining many of the roads. Ditto with Empidonax flycatchers. We managed to photograph all 5 of the common PNW breeding species (and I had just photographed the sixth breeding species, Least Flycatcher, in Ohio - what a grand slam!), and much to my surprise, the most common was the Gray Flycatcher, perhaps moving downhill from its nearby juniper breeding grounds. Wilson's and Yellow Warblers were also superabundant, the latter a common breeder there.

Of course there were plenty of other birds, and our trip total, not in any way trying big-day tactics, was 115 species. To me, more exciting was that we photographed 68 species. The place really is a photographer's dream. There were some fields of camas around Burns that presented mind-boggling expanses of blue.

Driving around the back roads around Burns and Hines has to be one of the birding highlights of the entire PNW, as you pass all the breeding shorebirds one after another, some at pointblank range. Killdeers, Black-necked Stilts, American Avocets, Willets, Spotted Sandpipers, Long-billed Curlews, Wilson's Snipe, and Wilson's Phalaropes are common. Black Terns are common. Scattered Sandhill Cranes. Waterfowl of many species, mostly dabbling ducks that breed there. But, for example, a male Ruddy Duck displayed at a female in a pond about 30' from us, quite unconcerned with our present. We found one pond on the north side of hwy 20 east of Burns that had ALL of the shorebirds at it, with as much foraging and courtship behavior as any ardent ethologist would wish to see.

On a quiet evening, the winnowing of snipe and the display calls of Willets resound from all sides, as well as constant "songs" of Yellow-headed Blackbirds, Soras, Marsh Wrens, and others.

The headquarters, usually a hotbed of migrants, seemed a bit slow this weekend, but nevertheless there is always something of interest there, if only the hordes of Belding's Ground Squirrels. Sadly, the NWR system seems to have a new paradigm - get rid of introduced plant species - so they have taken away a lot of the small trees and shrubs that have always furnished habitat and insects for hungry migrants there. What is wrong with those people? They take a sensible mandate to reduce the number of invasive plants on NWRs and extend it by some cookie-cutter mentality to removing masses of plants important to wildlife at artificial oases such as this one. Seemed to be a minimum of vagrants present this weekend, probably to the disappointment of some of the many birders we saw there. There had been a Hooded Oriole at a hummingbird feeder at Fields.

Sadly, Malheur Lake is dry, so White Pelicans, Clark's Grebes, and other birds that you usually see there were not to be found. It has been dry in the area, and I think the abundance of water at Burns and on the refuge in general is presumably from snow melt from higher elevations, actively moved around for irrigation and refuge management. Steens Mountain was still quite snow-covered. There was so much water I decided it could rightfully be called a photographer's wet dream.

The little oasis at Fields was full of empidonax and Wilson's Warblers, and the drive down the Catlow Valley to get there was beautiful as usual, with some rich wildflower shows.

I suspect many of the migrants will be gone by next weekend, but the water birds that make the area so special will be there.
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Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net



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