Dear Tweeters,
My wife told me a week or two ago that was seeing some brown swallows in Lyman, by a steep riverbank. Today (the 27th of May) I finally checked it out. There were over twenty Bank Swallows entering and leaving a cluster of holes in the bank! I had not seen one so far west in Washington, as I recall. In fact, the only other colonies in Skagit that I know about are way up along the Sauk River, and along the Skagit, well above Concrete.
The site is right in the town of Lyman, Skagit County, east of Sedro-Woolley, and just 200 meters SE of the town cemetery's southeast corner. This is where several houses and other structures have been lost to the river over the past two or three years. A side-channel of the river, once a small creek, has turned into a big one, nearly half the size of the main channel. It has gouged its way ever closer to West Main Street. The exposed riverbank is easily visible from a gravel, horseshoe-shaped pullout that allows one to park and explore the Cascade Trail, which goes past the colony. The county has signs up discouraging people from stepping out onto this bank, but any sort of scope would give a great view from the trail itself.
Yesterday I went back to Northern State Recreation Area near Sedro-Woolley, to see if the Black Phoebe might still be there. Now I have my doubts that the bird will stay, at least at the "Farmstead Bridge." Little boys were splashing around under the bridge, and throwing rocks! 
Phoebes can tolerate a lot of disturbance, but NSRA has lately been turning into Coney Island West. Since the plague began, I have noticed a far higher level of visitation there. In any case, the powers that be had already begun constructing big, expensive new bathrooms and picnic facilities, near the big new parking area on Helmick Road--so the gem that is NSRA will probably never be the quiet, isolated place it has been for the last few decades. Well, actually, once the miserable autumn weather sets in, it will probably quiet down--but no one is in a rush for that!
Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch
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