Though the weather has been nice the last couple of days, Connor and I have both been sick. Rowan started feeling sick yesterday and was pretty much out of commission today. Yesterday Connor, Rowan, and I visited the park beach briefly when I dropped off a CD of photos for the park to use. This afternoon Connor and I walked down along the beach to the end of park.
Weather: It’s been mostly sunny the last couple of days. Temperatures have been in the lower 60’s, I think. It’s a little hard to tell for sure, since the outdoor thermometer gets hit by the sun a little more now that it is lower in the sky. There was a pretty good breeze blowing in from the water.
Birds: There were several ducks off the park yesterday. One of them was a scaup, the others looked like they might have been Green-winged Teal, but it seemed odd for a scaup to be swimming along with teal. The light was pretty harsh and I did not have binoculars, so it was difficult to get a good look at them.
Connor noticed a dead Western Sandpiper today. There were no obvious injuries, so I do not know what might have killed it. I had been walking in front of Connor and totally missed it.
The gulls were scattered around the bay as the tide was in and I think people had been walking along the beach periodically. Connor and I sat and watched a dozen or more Black Turnstones and a couple of Semipalmated Sandpipers for a while. The tide started going out as we were watching and no one else walked along the beach. It was interesting to see the gulls start to accumulate on the shore. By the time we left there were at least a couple of hundred. The light was pretty bright/harsh, so I did not get too good a look, but it seemed that most of the gulls were Thayer’s Gulls.
There were some Savannah Sparrows flitting between the beach and the vegetation above the beach.
I saw a Song Sparrow eating seeds from Spearscale (Atrixplex patula).
Today there was a Greater Scaup and two Northern Pintails in the estuary.
There were warblers in the backyard today. They were bright yellow, so I am thinking they were either Yellow Warblers or Wilson’s Warblers, but I am not sure which.
Other Notes: Rowan found a moth yesterday that looked like a Yellow Underwing Moth that was either strangely deformed or (more likely) exceptionally beat up. She wanted to save it, so I suggested she hide it somewhere that it could be protected from being found by birds. At first she was going to hide it in the rocks on the beach, but I suggested that might not be the best as the tide would cover the location. In the end, she hid it in a hole in a beach log.