Birds in Washington

I posted the waterfowl on the sound off Whidbey Island (see mystery ducks) - though here's one I didn't put up then, since I hadn't seen it yet. He (the black and white one) puzzles me - you'd think he'd be obvious in the book, but mine is Eastern Region and he must not ever come here. It was another gray, gray day, so it's another grainy photo... So, Deborah suggests female bufflehead, and I thought of that but the spot looks too big for a bufflehead. Still, what do I know?



And here are most of the other birds I saw in Washington - no pictures of the Cooper's hawk or the bald eagles (so cool!) that I saw while driving on Whidbey. Three eagles all told, two juveniles and one adult. I have some of the swamp wrens, but far too blurry to put up - they're never still.

Oddly, I'd been there five days before seeing something that wasn't a gull or a crow. They still make up over 75% of what I did see... maybe over 85%. Several of the pictures below are of gulls; the adults all tend to look drably alike to me, but the juveniles are marvels of intricate brown embroidery. I'm not sure what two of the juveniles are - probably the flying one is a herring and the standing a glaucous, but honestly, I'm not at all sure of that.

This, I think, is a ruby-crowned kinglet, but (as always) I could be wrong. Whatever he is, though, I've never seen him before.


This is a robin - there were lots of them around, though not in gull or crow numbers.


Here's a finch of some sort, most likely a house finch.


This is one of a pair of handsome ducks, probably some sort of domestic, at a winery on Whidbey Island.


Here's the other one.


A group of wigeons, also at the winery.


These are some mallards, living up to their rep as the most common duck in the world.


And here is another common sight - domestic mutt mallards. This pale brown one is rather handsome, as are the blue-headed drakes behind him. (Of course the sun came out for the mallards, not the ones I'd never seen before...)


A crow, stepping out

A chickadee through a window at a restaurant on Whidbey (I like the way my camera elected to focus on his foot...)

Herring gulls on the Mukilteo-Clinton ferry.


On the same ferry, a juvenile herring gull.


And, also on the ferry, a young, possibly glaucous, gull


Flying behinnd the ferry, another young gull, possibly a glaucous

And here's an adult glaucous - rather an attractive bird, for a gull, and one I hadn't seen before