Skip to main content

Shorebirds and Boreal Birds and Butterflies in Washington State

 

On August 17, I began the 1500-mile drive north to visit my brother, who lives in Burton in interior British Columbia. I was planning to do some birding in Washington State to get a few new state birds on the way up. My initial goal was to see the three remaining shorebirds that occur at more or less annually in the state that I had not seen, followed by a visit to the boreal forests in the extreme NE corner of the state.

I arrived in WA around 4 pm on Aug 18 and proceeded to check out some ponds near Pasco for shorebirds. The water levels and viewing angles were not that great and the best were four Solitary Sandpipers I saw flying off.  At that point, I decided to drive to another set of ponds about an hour away that had some good recent ebird lists. Upon arrival, I saw no fewer than five Solitary Sandpipers in a single scan, as well as a Semipalmated Sandpiper in with the Leasts and Westerns, both yellowlegs and Black-necked Stilts. All very nice but not what I was hoping to see. One of the best ebird lists had mentioned that the totals included the ‘restricted access areas’ and, figuring that at 7 pm there would likely be no enforcement, I drove in on some gravel tracks to view some other ponds.

The first pond gave me the trifecta of needed shorebirds with four American Avocets, five Wilson’s Phalaropes and two juveniles Stilt Sandpipers, in among many other shorebirds, including numerous Lesser Yellowlegs and a single Baird’s Sandpiper. The next ponds added even more shorebirds, including three Pectoral Sandpipers. In total, I ended up with over 40 Lesser Yellowlegs. A very productive hour’s birding.

I drove another two hours to Spokane and got a hotel for the night. Since it was over a two-hour drive to reach the boreal forest habitat and I was burned out from two days of near constant driving, I spent the next morning relaxing in the hotel prior to gassing up the car and buying some bear spray.

In mid-afternoon, I reached the boreal forest habitat on the higher slopes of Salmo Mountain. I was especially hoping to see Boreal Chickadee, American Three-toed Woodpecker and White-winged Crossbill, all of which were state birds. I also hoped to see Spruce Grouse, which is a species I had only seen three times previously.  A major highlight on the drive-up were two very confiding Ruffed Grouse, although these were unfortunately on the wrong side of the car for a photograph. There were also spectacular numbers of nymphalid butterflies with a few hundred Green Commas, with smaller numbers of Zephyr Commas, California Tortoiseshells, Mourning Cloaks and Lorquin’s Admirals.

Lorquin's Admiral

Green (or Faunus) Comma

Once up in the boreal forest zone, the birding proved rather frustrating, with a steady diet of Mountain Chickadees, Red-breasted Nuthatches and Dark-eyed Juncos. A few warblers included a Nashville and I had a flyby flock of four Evening Grosbeaks. The best were nice looks at Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Clark’s Nutcracker and Townsend’s Solitaire. I eventually tracked down an odd nasal call to a Pika. Persistence finally paid off when I had mediocre views of a Boreal Chickadee, but an evening drive along the forest road for a few miles drew a blank on Spruce Grouse.

Pika

I managed a reasonable night’s sleep in the car and repeated the forest road drive at dawn with similarly negative results. I then began to walk along the road, hoping to run into more birds. Almost immediately, I had a male Pine Grosbeak fly into a treetop, and shortly afterwards, had two more fly over calling. I had a few audio and visual encounters with crossbills, but the birds were too distant to specifically identify. Individuals of both Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks appeared, but I missed the Goshawk seen by some other birders.

Three-Toed Woodpecker

I had been detecting a lot more woodpecker activity compared to the previous afternoon and eventually was successful in finding a drumming Three-toed Woodpecker, shortly followed by a Hairy Woodpecker. I also ran into a couple of family parties of Gray (Canada) Jays. Finally, some solid boreal bird action.

Gray Jay

Getting back to the trailhead, I hiked out along the Salmo Basin Trail. I had a couple more Pine Grosbeaks, but as ever they stayed high up. Further along, I found a nice mixed flock with both kinglets and multiple warbler species. Even better, I had good looks at a Boreal Chickadee. With bird activity now quieting down, I decided to head down the mountain and drive to my brother’s.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Productive Pelagic

  Whenever there is an El Nino, there is a lot of anticipation of rare pelagic species owing to the changes in water temperatures and potential displacement of species far from their normal abodes. In practice, there are a number of species – Least and Black Storm-petrels, Craveri’s Murrelets and Elegant Terns, for example – that do predictably move further north, but we are still waiting for Wedge-tailed Shearwaters to show up more commonly even though they are quite regular in numbers around the southern tip of Baja California. One group of birds that has become much commoner over the last decade is boobies. I was hopeful that the “Super El Nino” would bring in an influx of Masked, Nazca and Red-footed Boobies into Southern California mirroring the effect of the “Blob” a few years ago. Although sea surface temperatures were much warmer than normal in the spring, after that they failed to advance much through the early part of the summer and it was only in August that they sta...
Post a Comment
Read more

My Santa Barbara County Philadelphia Vireo

2026 has been proving to be a productive year for additions to my Santa Barbara county list. Most of the more ‘gettable’ additions are seabirds, assuming I can stomach going on enough pelagic trips. Among the potential passerine vagrants I had yet to see, Philadelphia Vireo stood out as one that I should get sooner or later. However, after 26 years in the county with only one chaseable bird that I had missed, it seemed far from inevitable that I would see one. Ironically, when I first moved to California in 1992, Philadelphia Vireo was the first CBRC rarity that I found – a bird at Andrew Molera State Park on the Big Sur coastline of Monterey County. A few years later, the CBRC removed this species from their review list as it had proven to be a fairly regular vagrant. However, Philadelphia Vireo occurs much more frequently in the (San Francisco) Bay Area than they do along the southern coast of California. During my time in the county, there had been only three records, so about six...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Big Montane Year Arrives

  Although a few bird species that require coniferous forest are resident in the highest peaks of the San Rafael Mountains in Santa Barbara County, these mountains need special access permissions and require multi-hour drives on poorly maintained dirt roads. As a result, it makes more sense to drive a slightly longer amount of time to the California Sierras or other high mountain ranges in Southern California to see these species and several others that do not breed or winter regularly in the county. In my case, you may have read here that I just had driven a lot further to see many of these species in Washington and British Columbia. However, in some years the failure of cone crops can trigger irruptive behavior in many montane bird species when they can appear in areas far from their normal range. On the morning of September 5, I visited the Hollister Tech Park, which is sometimes a productive site for migrating warblers. I found very few warblers but was surprised to turn up...
Post a Comment
Read more