Penny, the flooded field on the west side of the Bayview-Edison Road (S of the T junction) that had such big flocks of Dunlins four winters ago, and all the raptors hunting them, is still there. I don't know why there were no Dunlins there the two times we passed it in the last month or so. Maybe they just got tired of being eaten. Maybe they were all eaten!

Dennis


On Jan 19, 2014, at 5:18 PM, <plkoyama at comcast.net> wrote:

> Dennis and Tweets,
> Yikes, what flooded farm fields? On this year?s Skagit CBC, David and I had zero
>
> From: Dennis Paulson
> Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2014 2:11 PM
> To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Where have all the shorebirds gone?
>
> I wonder if a lot of these shorebirds depend on flooded farmlands for feeding when the tide is so high in the winter. They certainly do use them extensively, Dunlins and Black-bellied Plovers more than Sanderlings. That spell of extreme cold might have frozen all of them and sent the birds southward. Dunlins, like many other birds, are very flexible about things like that.
>
> Dennis Paulson
> Seattle
>
> On Jan 18, 2014, at 12:00 PM, tweeters-request at mailman1.u.washington.edu wrote:
>
>> Message: 14
>> Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2014 21:53:27 -0800 (PST)
>> From: Gary Bletsch <garybletsch at yahoo.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Where have all the shorebirds gone?
>> To: B Boekelheide <bboek at olympus.net>
>> Cc: tweeters tweeters <tweeters at u.washington.edu>
>> Message-ID:
>> <1390024407.51282.YahooMailNeo at web126105.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>>
>> Dear Bob and Tweeters,
>>
>> I can't say I've made a huge effort to find shorebirds lately, but I have been out birding the flats quite a few times since the new year. I have not seen a single Dunlin this year in Skagit County. The only shorebirds I have found have been Black Oystercatchers, Black Turnstones, Greater Yellowlegs, and Killdeer. Up to the 21st of December, I was seeing fairly good flocks of Dunlin in Skagit County, with a high of 5000 birds one day, but no really large flocks. I haven't seen any Dunlin at all since a few days before Christmas.
>>
>> Yours truly,
>>
>> Gary Bletsch
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tweeters mailing list
> Tweeters at u.washington.edu
> http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/tweeters

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



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman1.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20140119/a6e43567/attachment.htm