2015 / 2016 Year List Update

Okay, I've fallen way behind the times here, but I still want to post my annual update about my 2015 bird year list, and better late than never, right? Since 2010 I've had a challenge going with Dave over in England, and starting in 2011 my dad joined in as well. I've never beat my dad (who tends to travel more than I do), and I've only beat Dave once (in 2014, though we miraculously tied in 2013!), but it's still fun to play. I'm afraid my lack of blogging over the last couple months has coincided with a lack of birding, so not only did I lose this year but I lost to both of them pretty badly! Here are the numbers:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Total # Bird Species	233	203	222	192	201	176
Dave's Total	237	206	275/205*	192	179	200
Dad's Total		230	204	222	250	245
# States/ Provinces	6	4	5	4	5	6
# Life Birds	23	3	6	3	11	2
# SJ County Species	133?	157	145	149	142	128
# Species by Month
January	87	114	105	110	86	84
February	19	13	52	6	57	7
March	25	12	3	14	8	49
April	21	25	12	20	13	13
May	37	17	24	10	9	8
June	24	2	14	5	6	5
July	1	4	0	1	1	1
August	2	4	3	2	0	2
September	3	5	0	1	5	0
October	2	1	6	0	11	1
November	4	4	0	22	5	3
December	8	2	3	0	0	3

Of course the listing is just for fun, and it's really all about getting out there and enjoying nature and seeing the birds. Here are some highlights of my bird-watching in the last month or so, also demonstrating all the regional travel I've been doing!

Bald Eagle in Cowichan Bay, BC

Great egret in Scappoose, Oregon

Chestnut-backed chickadee in St. Helens, OR

Barrow's goldeneye in Duncan, BC - species #171 in 2015, and #4 in 2016)

Golden-crowned kinglet in Duncan, BC (2016 year bird #33)

Trumpeter swans in Duncan, BC (2016 year bird #20)

Trumpeter swans in Cowichan Bay, BC

Trumpeter swans in Skagit County, WA

Rough-legged hawk in Skagit County, WA (2016 year bird #56)

Red-tailed hawk (dark morph) in Friday Harbor, WA

Immature bald eagle in Surrey, BC

As of now, January 13, my 2016 year list sits at 67 species. My first bird of the year was an American robin, and it was awesome to have Barrow's goldeneye in the first five species of the year. Some other early highlights include pileated woodpecker (#13), Virginia rail (#37), rough-legged hawk (#56), and short-eared owl (#59). 67 puts me just ahead of my dad at 66 as of today, but meanwhile Dave's pulled ahead to a big early lead, with 91 species through January 12, but there's plenty of time to close that gap! Stay tuned for another year of friendly birding competition!

Ozette: Visiting the Outer Olympic Peninsula

Last week we went on a four day camping trip to Lake Ozette on the outer coast of the Olympic Peninsula. This is one of those places I've long wanted to visit but hadn't ever been to until now. It's only about 180 miles from Friday Harbor, but with two ferry rides and lots of winding roads it took about seven hours to get there, which is part of the reason why it hadn't happened until now!

The town of Sekiu along the Strait of Juan de Fuca - namesake for one of our whales (K22)

The big draw for me to Ozette was the nine mile Ozette loop hike I've read about. While we didn't have the best weather for our trip (what do you expect for camping in a rainforest?), conditions did cooperate pretty well for our hike. It was overcast but not windy or rainy. The trail is an equilateral triangle with two sides being mostly boardwalks through the woods and one side being along the beach.

The boardwalk trail to Cape Alava

Foxglove

Bunchberry, or dwarf dogwood, against a backdrop of multicolored moss

About two miles out the boardwalk takes you through a clearing, the site of a historic homestead slowly being reclaimed by the forest:

"Ahlstroms Prairie"

Then, not too long after, our first glimpse of the rugged coastline. This part of Washington is the most uninhabited shoreline in the Lower 48, feeling more like Alaska than the rest of the United States. There's no road access here, or hardly anywhere along this part of the coast - this particular stretch goes over 20 miles with no driving access or development of any kind. Even the "trail" itself is really just the beach, which means the going is pretty slow! Stretches of gravel beach are interspersed with rocky shorelines that you just traverse any way you can.

It's a refreshing sight to take in: a beach in a fairly pristine state. Seaweed covered rocks, thriving tidepools, offshore roosts for pelagic birds, foraging bald eagles, and crashing waves. Nothing else. In fact, during our hike we saw just as many eagles (11) as other people.

We came across a gray whale skull not too far down the beach.

Keith pays his respects

Another highlight was locating some petroglyphs from the Makah tribe that predate European arrival to the Pacific Northwest. Pretty cool to see some killer whales etched into the rocks:

The true highlight, though, was the geology: all the sea stacks make for a very impressive landscape.

In some places, the headlands are only passable at low tides. There are overland trails you can take if you arrive at high tide, but I was glad we snuck through before the water got too high. This overland "trail" looked more like a rock climbing wall - notice the rope and near-vertical incline to the left of the sign. I would have been a bit scared to tackle that!

Of course, no where is truly pristine anymore, least of all the ocean. There was a fair amount of large garbage/debris that washed up, including lots of buoys, canisters, and derelict fishing gear. Several items appeared to be of Asian origin:

When we got to Sand Point, where the trail heads back inland, I was looking at some seals through binoculars and I was surprised to see a sea otter pop up! I really shouldn't have been surprised - when people identify our Salish Sea river otters as sea otters I often tell them how since the hunting era when sea otters were locally extirpated, they haven't returned to Washington's inland waters but are thriving on the outer coast where they have been reintroduced. Still, I wasn't expecting to see one! We actually ended up seeing about ten or so. I wasn't carrying my telephoto lens so unfortunately this is the only picture you get to see of one:

The hike was well worth the trip, but of course I was keeping my eyes open for wildlife all the time. In addition to the Swainson's thrush (170), warbling vireo (171), black-headed grosbeak (172), and cedar waxwing (173) that I added to the year list in recent weeks, on this trip I added purple martin (174 - in Friday Harbor while waiting for the ferry!), common nighthawk (175), and red crossbill (176). The most entertaining birds were the ones that visited camp, however - the normally skittish Steller's jays were quite the camp robbers:

Notice the blue "eye spots" indicative of the coastal morph of the Steller's jay - inland birds have white eye spots.

One of my all-time favorite birds, the Steller's jays are a Pacific Northwest icon conspicuously absent from San Juan Island. They don't like to fly over water - but have made it over the shorter waterways to nearby Orcas and Shaw Islands. As I mentioned, on this trip these guys were always hanging around looking to swoop in for food scraps. When we were packing up, with doors and the trunk open, I was surprised to see one fly out of my car!

There were also lots of fledglings being fed, particularly robins, chestnut-backed chickadees, and golden-crowned kinglets. Here's a young kinglet begging for food from its parent - it was amazing to see how many insects the kinglets could round up in a very short period of time! I guess you have to keep pretty busy to keep a hungry baby satiated.

Finally, no camping trip is complete without a couple of campfires - that's one of the best parts!

And a few roasted marshmallows, too....oops, burned this one!

Mixed Flock of Birds

This is the time of year when you start seeing large mixed-species flocks of woodland birds. I love coming across such a pocket of birds during a hike. All of a sudden the stillness of the forest is disturbed by a cacophony of peeps and chirps, and you see little bursts of movements among the branches as birds flit from limb to limb. Yesterday the flock I found myself in the middle of contained golden-crowned kinglets, bushtits, chestnut-backed chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, and brown creepers. Song sparrows, golden-crowned sparrows, and spotted towhees were also nearby.

 

Golden-crowned kinglet

Even though the birds are everywhere, they are extremely difficult to photograph! They are constantly on the move, so as soon as you find one in the viewfinder, they're gone before you can click the shutter. You also have to try and focus through a maze of branches. I spent a while turning circles on the trail trying my best, and these are the only two decent photos I ended up with.

Bushtit

Mixed Flock at British Camp

This afternoon I took a hike at British Camp to see what sort of bird activity was going on there. There was surprisingly little activity on the water - the regular gathering of double-crested cormorants hanging out on the pilings across the bay and a few unidentified gulls, and that was it. The woods, however, were much busier, and I came across a large mixed flock of birds. I knew they were there because I heard them up in the treetops, but the first one to come down and check me out was this golden-crowned kinglet:

The kinglets seemed to make up the majority of the flock, but I also saw the expected chestnut-backed chickadees and red-breasted nuthatches. I was looking for any ruby-crowned kinglets that might be mixed in when a ruby-crowned kinglet look-alike popped into view: a Hutton's vireo. These guys look very similar to the ruby-crowned kinglet, but have a much stouter beak (compare to the golden-crowned kinglet's beak above) and also lack the black behind the second wing bar.

There was one other species I thought was likely to be in this flock, and sure enough just before I moved on I saw three or four brown creepers. They can be difficult to photograph, but this one was quite obliging for a moment, allowing me to get this photograph:

I heard a few spotted towhees and a northern flicker, and saw an American goldfinch in the parking lot as I was leaving, but that little hotspot was definitely the highlight of my birding walk.