Two crows sat in a tree watching the behavior of flocking humans, who were armed with binoculars and spotting scopes and watching seabirds during the 13th Olympic Peninsula BirdFest.
The humans were a varied lot: male and female, older and younger, one in an electric scooter, with equipment ranging from basic binoculars to high-end scopes.
Several trip leaders on my three outings did an excellent job identifying birds, providing scopes, sharing behavior information, and answering questions.
They also spotted birds that the rest of us missed.
The first trip I took was “Birding Sequim Bay &John Wayne Marina.” The marina is a regular stop for local birders on their hunt for seabirds. A grass-and-tree covered rise (wheelchair accessible) at the end of the north parking lot provides an excellent view.
Birders logged 47 species at several stops, including rhinoceros auklet, Eurasian and American widgeons, pelagic and double-crested cormorants, surf scoter, common murrelet, orange-crowned warbler, greater scaup, mew gull, black oystercatcher and harlequin duck.
Our timing was excellent at the cove near the south parking lot where gulls and widgeons shared space.
“Most were pink-legged gulls. Around here, we’ve nicknamed them Olympic gulls, because they’re a mix between glaucous-winged and Western gulls,” said trip leader Dave Jackson.
The ‘Olympics’ were in full taking-a-bath mode, with wings beating the water and stretching and heads dipping and flicking in the shallow end of a cove.
Most of the widgeons near the gulls were American widgeons, but there was one male Eurasian widgeon “on the wrong side of the Pacific Ocean,” Jackson said.
How do Eurasians wander that far off course?
“I’ve tried to interview them but they don’t want to talk to the microphone,” he said.
“It’s a miracle that they get to where they want to go most of the time. It’s quite possible that some get confused and come down the western coast of Alaska and Canada. It’s a more likely explanation than the winds carrying them.”
Another trip was “Dungeness Bay &Three Crabs Road.” Dungeness Landing County Park, six miles north of Sequim, offered easy access to a stretch of beach, a covered bird platform in case of inclement weather, and a superior view of Dungeness Spit, New Dungeness Light House, Cline Spit and Mount Baker.
We had three leaders to guide our eyes to productive areas. Gary Bullock had kept a running list of the birds seen from the parking lot on three trips. The list was 50-plus and counting.
One of the things about being a relatively new or somewhat experienced birder is that many birds seen on a field trip are new, so no matter how many times our leaders had seen a pigeon guillemot, that bird was still a first for many of the participants.
The first stop provided about 150 double-crested cormorants and a Caspian tern with its long bright-yellow bill, violet-green swallows, crows mobbing a red-tail hawk, red-breasted mergansers (more common than common mergansers), eight seals hauled out, black-bellied plover, dunlins, marbled godwit, green-winged teal, Western sandpiper, kingfishers sitting at the entrance to their burrows, the world’s largest songbird (raven), and a red biplane with a wing-walker.
The Three Crabs area at low tide offered some of the same species but with the addition of a close-by view of a large flock of dunlins feeding at the tideline as well as a greater yellowlegs and sanderlings.
To see if this festival might interest you, check out the field trips at www.olympicbirdfest.org.
The 2017 version will have similar outings.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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