Dear Tweeters,

Today (1-23-2011) I did some birding on Butler Flats and Samish Flats, plus a few other spots. On Butler Flats there was a nice flock of passerines along Kelleher Road, just W of the Avalon Golf Course entrance road. An ORANGE-CROWNED WARBLER joined a Lincoln's Sparrow, some Fox and Song Sparrows, and a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. A large number of ducks swam on the flooded field west of Green Road's north end. Among them were 18 Lesser Scaup.

I tried in vain for Hutton's Vireo at Pomona Grange Park. It is early yet.

On the Samish Flats, I made rather a quick run through. There were a half-dozen or so each of Western Meadowlarks and Savannah Sparrows at the East Nineties. One adult Peregrine was on a pole near the south end of the flat part of Bay View-Edison Road.

Afterwards, I had about given up on birding for the day, since I had to go to Fred Meyer's in Burlington. I decided to check the Anacortes Street Pond, not far from the commercial strip in Burlington. This pond is just east of the railroad tracks along Anacortes Street's west side, north of the USACE and dike district offices.

This pond can be worthless for birding one day, and fabulous the next. It is mainly good during shorebird migration and waterfowl wintering season. Today it was fabulous for the latter. I counted exactly 200 Branta geese out there, with a single GREATER WHITE-FRONTED GOOSE adult towering among the Branta. White-fronts do turn up here now and then. The Branta geese were every single one of them small. However, three of them were tiny, with wee little stubby bills, definitely CACKLING GEESE. I heard quite a few cackles coming from this flock, too, above the din of an idling BNSF freight train. I never did hear any honest-to-goodness "Ka-ronk" calls, making me think that none of these geese were Canadas. However, many of the slightly larger but still very small geese puzzled me. About ten of them had whitish breasts. All of these little Branta were much smaller than the White-front, but bigger than the Wigeon, which were the only ducks grazing with the
geese. I don't know if the slightly large geese were small Canadas, or some race of the Cackler--I wish I had a compact set of pictures with range maps and ID info that I could stick into my field guide; I can never get all this Taverner's-Hutchins-Richardson's-Greater-Lesser mumbo jumbo straight in my mind!

Another cool species at the pond caught my attention. Among the dozens of Mallards, Wigeon, and Green-winged Teal were two pairs of NORTHERN SHOVELLERS. These were my first for the year, and first in quite a while now. As is usually the case this time of year, the two drake Shovellers were in a frowsy state of plumage, although all the other drake dabblers were looking spiffy.

A lone drake Common Merganser was in this big flock of ducks here, too. I can't figure out why this pond gets so many birds, surrounded as it is by a narrow bit of mundane-looking farmland, sandwiched in amongst a busy railway line, an industrial site, and some suburban homes. There are many seemingly more attractive ponds out in the sticks that never get this sort of flock.

Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch
Near Lyman, Washington (Skagit County), USA?garybletsch at yahoo.com?

Mentre che li occhi per la fronda verde
ficcava ?o s? come far suole
chi dietro a li uccellin sua vita perde, lo pi? che padre mi dicea: ?Figliuole,
vienne oramai, ch? ?l tempo che n?? imposto
pi? utilmente compartir si vuole?.??