Tweets - Mark Crawford and I headed down to bird from Vantage to Sunnyside
today.

We had thick, thick fog from Vantage to Vernita, which pretty much killed
any hope of birding that stretch. So we cut west on SR-24 into a beautiful
sunny warm November day.

At the Moxee Experimental Station (mp. 16.3 on SR-24), we had a BARRED OWL
in the NW corner. A little further west on SR-24, we had a MERLIN on one of
the poles at a hops farm.

Our various stops in Yakima at ponds and along the Yakima Greenway didn't
yield too much of interest. We had very few ducks or other waterfowl. Our
best bird was probably the HERMIT THRUSH that popped up at Sportsman's State
Park.

At Toppenish NWR, we had a very active NORTHERN SHRIKE, which we last saw
trying to catch a DOWNY WOODPECKER.

On our way from Toppenish NWR to Granger, we took back roads. On Chambers
Rd., we found a small flock of SNOW GEESE on an old corn field. Chambers is
the western extension of SR-223 out of Granger.

So, despite the early fog, we enjoyed a nice day birding. But it was mostly
pretty quiet...

== Michael Hobbs
== Kirkland, WA
== http://www.marymoor.org/birding.htm
== http://www.marymoor.org/BirdBlog.htm
== birdmarymoor at frontier.com