I am surprised that no one else has weighed in on this, but as far as I know it was not seen today, despite a veritable search party of 30-35 that swept through the campground in a very organized-;well more of whiling spiral-;search pattern generally from about 9 am to 2 pm. Some of drove around into the closed camping sites too and did not find

The reward was the incredible number and close encounters with Townsend's warblers (32 at least), red-breasted nuthatches (29 at least), and chestnut backed chickadees (46 at least) along with juncos (43), creepers (4), and a few varied thrush (2) and hermit thrush (4), as well as a roosting barred owl (which may contain the bunting....)

My assessment was that the (very cool-looking) dwarf Sitka spruces were coning out, and the ground was covered with millions of seeds, hence the unusual ground-feeding behavior of the nuthatches and chickadees, and the warblers were getting bits of the broken seeds, plus there were a lot of spruce adelgids (like white aphids) flitting about to snatch.

A few Pac wren, golden-crowned kinglet, and song sparrow and that was it for the campground

Of course many waterfowl and raptors along the Willapa coast and sloughs

Mark Tomboulian

Shoreline WA
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/tweeters/attachments/20191216/eeb91131/attachment.html>