Date: 10/19/25 9:27 am From: Dennis Paulson via Tweeters <tweeters...> Subject: [Tweeters] the fun of birding
By now, I assume all the tweeters who wish to have gone to the Grays Harbor NWR (Bowerman Basin) and seen the Yellow-green Vireo. Elaine Chuang, Netta Smith and I did so yesterday and had a great time. Hard as it was to photograph among those leaves and branches, we all got satisfactory photos. I don’t get many life birds in North America these days, but photographing a species for the first time is just as good as a life bird in my book.
But half or more of the fun was seeing so many familiar faces, some from long ago. In my advanced age, I wish everyone we saw in the field had a name tag, so I could put names to faces, and I apologize if I didn’t recognize someone I should have!
We stopped at the Cedar River mouth on the way home and with good luck spotted both the American Golden-Plover that had been there for a while and an unexpected adult Lesser Black-backed Gull, both of which we photographed. That one was especially welcome, as we had gone to the Chittenden Locks three times to look for the one that was there, but it was never there when we were. Fortunately, the Glaucous-winged antics (swallowing sea stars!) and pinniped presence made up for it, and we even saw a salmon in the viewing room.
To me, the biggest surprise was seeing a few Heermann’s Gulls with the California Gulls that flew high in the air over the ship channel heading for Lake Washington. I’ve never seen one in fresh water, and maybe when they got there, they said “eeew” and flew back to Puget Sound.
