Hello All,
Ryan Shaw, Bruce LaBar, Bill Tweit, and I completed our weekend (after
Yellow-billed Loon and Northern Hawk Owl in Wenatchee and Chelan,
respectively) by birding the Waterville Plateau over to Banks Lake. We
arrived at Electric City Saturday with enough light to check the
various booms and sandbars for gulls, specifically looking for the
Lesser Black-backed Gull recently seen here. We didn't see the LBBG
that day, but did notice a Herring-type gull several shades darker in
mantle color than our normal smithsonianus birds at Coulee Playlands.
Looking closer, the bird had dark irides, and when it flew, it
displayed a partial "string of pearls" reminiscent of Slaty-backed
Gull. Ryan was able to get some photos of the bird.

Also, we ventured out of Grand Coulee on Sunday morning and drove
around in the Almira-Bagdad Junction Plateau area and were able to
find two Snowy Owls sitting in vast expenses of wheatland. Nice!

Back in Grand Coulee, we checked a couple of feeders in town and
stumbled into a Mountain x Black-capped Chickadee hybrid. The bird was
giving intermediate calls, and showed a thin supercilium on an
otherwise fairly BCCH-like bird. My only other record of this hybrid
was only a few miles away, at Spring Canyon Campground. We checked
gulls again and this time found the Lesser Black-backed Gull, flying
in to the red floats across the lake and chasing off all the other
gulls from that area.

Good birding,
Charlie Wright
Puyallup, Washington