I went to Magnuson Park in Seattle to do some duck watching yesterday on the wetlands and I was not disappointed. On the ponds/wetlands there was a mix of mallards, wigeon, green wing teal, and northern shoveler for puddle ducks. As for divers... there was a pretty good concentration of bufflehead and ring neck ducks and a few coots mixed in. I flushed a snipe near the ball diamonds. A first for me in the wetland was a female golden-eye (common?) hanging out alone. I observed a coopers hawk make a nice catch of a rat in the meadows and there were a lot of crows about. I didn't focus on the small birds but from what I heard/seen there were kinglets, juncos, chickadee b-capped and chestnut backed, robins. I never made it to the lake so I am sure I missed some more waterfowl sp. As I was returning to the car there was a flock of Canada geese near the soccer fields. In this flock there was a group of cacklers, half dozen or so greater white fronted geese and a single snow goose. I have never seen all these species together in a flock and it was nice to get a size comparison of them. And I didn't realize how rich in color the cackler geese were, bellies almost had a red hue.

Dan Lipinski
dano135 at hotmail.com