We started the day here at the west end of the Columbia River Gorge in Skamania County with our usual routine of having coffee while sitting on our front deck for a couple of hours watching the migrants moving through our woods. The first surprise sighting was of a Bobcat chasing a rabbit down our driveway. When the sun warmed up that sitting area we moved to one on the north side of the house where the Bitter Cherry and Cascara trees were full of Cedar Waxwings and Evening Grosbeaks along with a few Western Tanagers. They devoured every berry with any color on it and we even saw them eating green Cascara berries. This is the earliest that our berry crop has been consumed and it looks like our plantings of European Mountain Ash have a very sparse crop for later migrants. We spent the rest of our birding time at the north deck when we took breaks from gardening and stacking firewood. On one of these breaks among the Anna's and Rufous Hummingbirds fighting over the feeders and plantings there we could hear a different chip that we finally identified when a Black-chinned Hummingbird landed on a feeder and refused to be budged by the Rufous. On another break we saw a swarm of Vaux's Swifts buzzing around a high flying Cooper's Hawk. But the most unexpected sighting was four Clark's Nutcrackers that came through the trees as they cleared the top of the 1,000' ridge we live on, our first here in forty three years. We ended the day with a tally of forty-one species. Wilson Cady
Columbia River Gorge, WA
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