Refusing to work outdoors in 95-degree heat, I instead headed out to Westport and surrounds yesterday.? The highlights:
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Midway Beach:
Snowy Plover was difficult to find from outside the cordoned area, but eventually showed well.? At the ponds, a dozen Short-billed Dowitchers, a Spotted Sandpiper, 50+ Least Sandpipers, a flock of flyover Whimbrel, several Killdeer, at least twenty Wilson?s Snipe, and ten yellowlegs,? 4 of one, half-dozen the other?
At the beach, small numbers of Sooty Shearwaters cruised very close in, just beyond the surfline. A raft of at least fifty loons, mostly or all Pacific Loons, floated a bit further out.
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Bottle Beach:
On incoming tide, 250+ Black-bellied Plovers ?at all stages of molt, a good contingent of dowitchers, a lonely, early Dunlin, still in reasonably intact breeding plumage, two Ruddy Turnstones, and surprisingly few peeps, given the time and location.? Best birds for me weren?t the shorebirds, however, but the four Common Terns, with a few Caspian buddies to really accentuate their sleek, stylish forms, that loafed on the mud for a while.? By true high tide, around 1:00, there were also ten Whimbrels foraging within twenty feet of dry sand, and a single Semipalmated Sandpiper tucked in among the Westerns and Leasts.
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Hoquiam:
The ponds were hopping when I got there around 1:30.? A cursory count got me 500 Caspian Terns roosting on the gravelly dike between the ponds, with a larger number of gulls, mostly Californiaand Ring-billed.? A few dozen Brown Pelicans and a smattering of Heermann?s andWestern Gulls rounded out the naptime crowd.? A relatively recently ?formed? patch of gravelly mud on the near shore, just east of the ?T? with Paulson Road, was alive with shorebirds, most notably a rather out of place American Avocet and a pair of Baird?s Sandpipers.
The walk out the boardwalk was mostly time wasted.? Thousands of shorebirds roosting and just waking up for lunch, but they all seemed to be of the same three species:? Least and Western S?pipers and Semipalmated Plovers.? There was brief excitement when a Merlin kicked them up.? On the walk back, however, was the best (unidentified) bird of the trip.? While stalking a Willow Flycatcher in the scattered trees just east of where the boardwalk enters the tall alders, I heard an unfamiliar ?chee-up? from a willow bough hanging right over the boardwalk, and caught a glimpse of a warbler-sized (and ?shaped) bird darting (warbler-like) from twig to twig.? Never got an unobstructed look through the willow leaves, except for a dull yellow wing with pale gray or white wingbars.? Nothing I?ve ever seen in Washington?? I?d love to have my suspicions of this bird?s ID confirmed, so anybody going out that way this weekend, please keep an eye
and ear open for anything odd along the latter part of the boardwalk?
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Jeff Bryant
Seattle
jbryant_68 AT yahoo?