It was 43° and mostly cloudy when we
got up and drove out to the Eagles Pride golf course to go birding with Denis DeSilvis
and Dave Wienecke, along with 10 other birders for the monthly bird walk. This group meets the third Thursday at 8 a.m.
at the driving range.
It had rained all night, but some blue
sky was showing this morning. The 12 of
us had an easy walk, but with long stretches with no birds either seen or heard;
the woods were pretty quiet for most of our walk, right up until we returned to
the parking area. But, that gave us the
chance to notice other natural history stuff, like the many flicker holes in
the thatch ant nests. The Northern
Flicker burrows into the ant nests, looking for tasty larvae and pupae for its
meal. All of the ant nests we saw had
recent holes in them!
One of these days, I'm going to look up the several lichens that we see on tree branches.
And, since birding was kind of slow
this morning, we had many opportunities to pick up lost golf balls from the
roughs. Pete collects these balls, then
provides them to folks using them for an activity through the Wounded Warriors
Project.
Denis wrote that the 27 species today
beat out last month's 21 species. Highlights
included three duck species (Ring-necked, Mallard, and Bufflehead), 57 Golden-crowned
Kinglets, and in the last 100 yards of the walk, we encountered a really nice
mixed-species flock with Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Brown
Creepers, Downy Woodpecker, Red-breasted Nuthatch, and a bunch of Dark-eyed
Juncos thrown in nearby.
 |
| Golden-crowned Kinglet in the Douglas Fir |
The three Varied Thrushes were all in the cut-through
between Holes 15 and 16, as was our only American Robin of the day. Unlike last
month's record-high number of crows (421), we spotted the more usual 6 today.
Several
of us stopped at the Nisqually Gill for lunch and a pint, and I headed home to
get ready for my trip to the Okanogan tomorrow.
Eagles Pride Golf Club eBird Checklist is Here
No comments:
Post a Comment