Hello, tweets.

Netta and I spent New Year's Day birding, a fine, cold, sunny day. The cold is so bearable when it's not windy!

Two highlights can be mentioned.

1) There was a spectacular concentration of eagles at what I suppose was the mouth of the Samish River. Looking north from the Bayview-Edison Road, west of Farm-to-Market Road, we could see a mixed "swarm" of Bald Eagles and Common Ravens swirling over the landscape. The sky was full of big dark birds, and for the 10 minutes we watched the spectacle was continuous. Interestingly, eagles were flying into the area from all directions, and a number of them passed right over us heading for the concentration. There were also eagles and ravens in the fields all around the area.

I took a lot of distant photos of the birds, which were spread over a quarter to a half mile of the landscape. It was easy to distinguish the two species by enlarging the photos. In one photo that I think contains the most birds, there are 32 eagles and 19 ravens. That photo may have captured a third of the birds in flight at that time, so there were around 100 eagles and 60 ravens in sight at once. I could see none of them except those in flight. It was obvious that birds were coming up into the air and dropping down again, so there were surely many more birds than that.

From the looks of it, there should be a slaughterhouse out there, but instead I wondered if there were great numbers of frozen salmon carcasses that had washed down with the floods and were now lying all over the shore and mudflats. I have never seen so many eagles in flight at once, although I've seen up to 500 of them (almost all perched) from a single spot at salmon rivers in BC. I think Bob Sundstrom mentioned a concentration of eagles a couple of weeks ago, perhaps the same assemblage. Several eagles flew into trees right in "downtown" Edison with prey, often chasing one another. One that I photographed was nibbling from a rather small mass of flesh, but I couldn't tell if it was fish or fowl.

There were more ravens than I have ever seen in that area. They were also hunting voles, and we watched one swallow one whole with one gulp. Very impressive. I think they also were going after the harriers that were catching voles. You've gotta feel a little sorry for the voles in a place like the Samish Flats!

2) Then there was the Northern Hawk Owl, famous visitor to Westham Island, BC. That was our destination, and after a nice walk around Reifel Migratory Waterfowl Refuge, we headed back to the spot. The bird was there, and the scene was overwhelming. Cars parked everywhere, paparazzi with long lenses spread along the road. If you want to see the latest in camera gear, just head for some staked-out readily photographable bird like this one. I should add that we passed a similar, if much smaller, concentration of high-end photo gear at the "Dunlin killing field" on the Samish Flats, where photographers waited patiently for some action while a Peregrine relaxed on a nearby dirt mound. The Canons really do look like cannons. But the tightly massed Dunlin flock on the frozen pond in the sun created a spectacle of its own.

Crowd control was in force at hawk owl corner, with birders warning other birders to stay off the lawns; that was a constant necessity. The bird spends a lot of time in the midst of a series of large yards, only the outer edges of which are available to birders and photographers, so there was a lot of frustration watching it at a distance for the first hour or more that we were there. As I was told was usual, it stayed in one spot, quite relaxed, until well into the afternoon, when it set out on a search for its daily meal.

Finally, the bird came out to the edge of the private properties and spent time along the road, where it was surely the most photographed bird in the Pacific Northwest. And it was in the sun! Netta and I took several hundred photos of it; modern cameras make that so easy, and it couldn't be resisted. The bird is incredibly tame, and when it landed low on one of the utility wires, one person stepped up right below it, 10-15' away, and it seemed to ignore him. Wouldn't it be great to know what's on a bird's mind! Or would we be shocked to know that an owl considered us inconsequential?

Diving down right in front of an appreciate audience, it missed one vole in a quick tussle. Back up at altitude, it watched from several other perches, and finally, as we continued to increase the ISO on our cameras as the light waned, it made a capture and flew back to its original roost tree on its own property to begin the evening meal. That was a happy ending (my apologies to those on the side of the voles).

Dennis
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Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net