Subject: [Tweeters] Magnuson Park, 13 February 2015
Date: Feb 13 21:25:47 2015
From: Scott Ramos - lsr at ramoslink.info


Yet another Spring-like day in the middle of winter. Amazing. Mild and calm with just enough clouds to make for a glorious sunrise. Lots of singing birds and flowering Indian plum more than made up for the squishy, muddy meadows. The local beavers must be pretty angry now?the human engineers put in piping into their two large dams to defeat the flooding, and the water level in the wetlands has dropped a couple of feet. Hasn?t affected the ducks, though. Some notables for the day:

Among the dozen or so Green-winged Teal, was one intergrade, with a pronounced horizontal white line and a faint vertical white bar; Entrance Pond
Lesser and Greater Scaup were way down in numbers, about 20 each
Red-breasted Merganser - half a dozen off the NOAA point
Cooper?s Hawk - 2 adults, one calling agitatedly from the uplands forest
Red-tailed Hawk - a juvenile, with vole in claw
Wilson?s Snipe - calling from the central meadows, early
Mew Gull - still huge numbers, between 150-200, moving around from the play fields to the swim platform to Kite Hill. Many Ring-billed and California, plus a Herring Gull, in a parking lot feeding frenzy.
Barn Owl - one flew out of the new 62nd Ave box into the adjacent trees, early
Pileated Woodpecker - a female working over a beached log in the Sail Lagoon
Pacific Wren - lots of singing
Ruby-crowned Kinglet - lots of singing, mostly partial songs; one was flaring its crown while singing its full song
Yellow-rumped Warbler - maybe 2 dozen, at least one Myrtle

For the day, 58 species.
Checklist: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S21803549 <http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S21803549>
Scott Ramos
Seattle