Last Call!

November

This is supposed to be the final trip of the year, and I had a long list of possibilities for the last eight birds to get me to 200 for the year. I packed up some things at home Friday night... napped... woke up and decided to make a go of it.  I'd talked to a couple about borrowing a scope, an amenity I usually did without (unless I was with others who had brought one).  I swung by their Bothell apartment and then hit the highway.

In this case, the highway was Highway 2.  It had been a wet day, but the weather was improving, and I was hopeful that a night like this could turn up an owl.  "Owls????", you might rightfully wonder, "Haven't you seen enough, you greedy...".  Well, okay, this is kind of true.  Having had Spotted, Barred, Flammulated, Western Screech-, Northern Pygmy-, Great Horned, and Northern Saw-whet, it had really been an exceptional year for owls.  Barn would be for a morning, and most others were pretty unlikely (Short-eared, Long-eared, Great Gray, Burrowing, Snowy), which leaves...

Boreal Owl

I need to justify this seemingly optimistic decision to look for Boreal Owls in Chelan County.  May I first present the ladies and gentlemen of the jury with exhibit A:

EXHIBIT A

This is from Birdweb on line - the Seattle Audubon's site, and the images themselves are from Birds of Washington, a sizable tome by Mlodinow, Twiet and Wahl.   If these range maps are to be trusted, there is at least a larger area of potential habitat for Boreal Owls in Chelan (if not actual owls) than any county in the state.  I had thought of making a run for them if the time and circumstances allowed for it.  IN this case, I was zeroed in on the part of the purple range that extends in like a pair of serrated scissors, or maybe a snake head.  The lower part of this is mentioned in Exhibit B:

EXHIBIT B

Before my GPS decided to quit helping

David Beaudette holds the record for species seen in a year in Chelan County:  A gaudy 240 from back in 2002, when this post was added on Tweeters.  A read of the Tweeters archives for 2002 is pretty amazing, as you see some of the birds that David found.  This was the lead I was following as I slipped up the Chumstick Highway sometime after midnight, and turned onto Eagle Creek Road.

This road had been good for owls:  I've had Barred, Great Horned and Flammulated.  Others had added Northern Pygmy and Northern Saw-whet.   It was a nice evening, and the road was very drivable, so it was really... really a nice start.  I picked up a few Barred Owls early on, then thought it would be worth pushing forward to find the turns I had marked out on the map.

At one point, I found myself staring at the arrangement of the roads... then down at the map... then at my GPS (out of range - no information), then down at the map... then at the numbered Forest Road sign, riddled with bullets into almost complete illegibility.  I decided that straight ahead was a good idea.  I would know I'd gone too far if I hit a series of...

Switchbacks

Which should have been the part of the story where I nodded knowingly and turned the car around, but that story was preempted by...


Mud

Welp...

The story I was ready to tell

I felt the traction disappear underneath me, and eyeballed my options for turning around.  The option I chose led to a slow slide of the front end of my car towards the ditch.  Trying to go down hill... trying anything really... got it moving towards the ditch.  Friends and neighbors, that is the front wheel of a front wheel drive car, buried pretty soundly in mud.  The time is 1:30 AM, and I am on a fairly remote Forest Road.  I thought over my options and decided to get into the car and try to get some sleep before figuring out something in the morning.

1:45 AM

I don't know exactly how to evaluate luck, or the enormous portion that was dropped uncermoniously onto my plate that night, but before I had hit anything resembling REM sleep, I peeked through my lids and saw lights.  The lights were dancing back and forth through the trees on the road below me, and I got out quickly to investigate. Flashlights were obviously the source.  "Help!!!!  I'm stuck!!   Can you help me??"  I called down below and waited.  Silence, and I tried again, and got a voice in return.

The elk hunters down below, husband and wife, had come up the same road with a proper vehicle (a Ford truck, rather than a Ford Taurus), but towing a camping trailer behind them that had become stuck.   They took their time in carefully getting themselves unstuck, and I will say with complete honesty that it was actually a lovely wait, made more lovely by a few calls by a Western Screech-Owl.   They then came up to help me.

Helping me in this case first meant tying my car to their truck and simply dragging me out.  I... look, you read about "towing capacity" and shrug, unless you understand the 800 thousand situations where you actually need it.  The fact that a truck was able to pull me out of that mud while itself resting on a muddy road makes me question what I had even learned as a physics major in college.  It may be a natural response in these situations to offer money, and I did, and it is probably a natural response to decline that money.   We've all had these times in life where someone saves our bacon without giving it a second thought.  I now have a lot of paying forward to do (just don't count on me to literally pull you out of the mud.  I don't think the Taurus has any of that towing capacity stuff.)

Wenatchee

A cup of optimism for breakfast

The car was moving just fine, unless I approached 60 miles an hour, when it would start to shake a bit.  It was good enough to get me to Wenatchee, where I stopped in at a Denny's to get a meal and regroup. I was casually chatting with the waitress about my car woes, and she decided to call a friend.  By the time I had finished breakfast, he had arrived (this was maybe... 5:30 AM).

Long stare at the car... "That's not really the right car for those roads."

"Well, I know for those conditions, yeah, but I'd never hit stuff like that in my life."

"You're... from the West side, yeah?"

"Yup."

"Yup."

Long pause...

Wenatchee waking up

We went on like this for maybe 10 minutes and may have exchanged as many sentences.  Finding out that he only took cash became a bit of a deal-breaker.  I asked for ideas on shops in town, and I was told not to go to any of the Mexican shops "because they only put Band-aids on things," and he added an exculpatory "I'm not trying to be racist,"  which didn't feel all that convincing.

I took the car over to Anglers, which was not opening for a couple hours more.  I dropped my key through the slot, left a voice mail and strolled off towards the waterfront with scope, binoculars, and a backpack to carry a few books.

Wallorafluence Natural State Area Park

For one last run I started on the south end of the string of waterfront parks - Walla Walla Point - walking through darkness right into Horan Natural Area, where I watched and listened near large fields, hoping for a Barn Owl.

Horan Natural Area

Probably not a real picture

I looked well past Barn Owl O'clock, which is usually during astronomical twilight, I figure.  I have a fascination with twilight that has nothing to do with vampires.  I looked it up once because I'd seen the terms enough times:  Astronomical twilight is the time when it is not bright enough to really be able to see where you're walking, but the sky has still brightened enough to cause the stars to fade.  Civil twilight is when it is bright enough to see where you're walking, and lasts until the sun actually rises.

The sunrise that morning... I've really been lucky with weather over the course of the year, and it was pretty surreal, what the sky did that morning. In addition, the fall colors were even better than they had been during my October trip. 

I saw a sparrow on a wire, and caught both the red cap and a hint of a central breast spot.  American Tree Sparrow!  193 for the year, and a nice code 4 bird.  I strolled farther up the path and relocated the bird, which I shot through the magic of digiscoping.

American Tree Sparrow - Horan Natural Area

My big regret was not hearing the bird call enough to really have the note burned in the brain, but having the picture did highlight a field mark that I had not been aware of before - the bi-colored bill.

Wenatchee Confluence State Park

I continued into Wenatchee Confluence Park, using some of my last bits of phone life to call the car place.  As I reached the far end of the park, and was walking back towards the camping area, I heard something I had never properly heard in life - a singing White-throated Sparrow.  There's something about hearing the song clearly, and this bird was making itself heard from... jeez it must have been a quarter mile if it wasn't a mile.  "Five miles away... those are some pretty impressive ears!"  I was thinking to myself when I finally came upon the bird, which had all of the field marks of Ken Hemberry, including the phone that he'd used to call for White-throated Sparrow.  Needless to say, I decided not to count that one.

Ken and Debbie Sutherland have been helping me off and on during the year, and it was good to see Ken and share some sightings.  He went back to his car as I continued the walk back through Confluence towards Walla Walla Point Park, which I had not properly seen in daylight.

The phone died sometime around here, but my luck was reborn:  Red-breasted Merganser (194) and Bonaparte's Gull (195).  The Bonaparte's Gull represented the single remaining bird from a week where I held firm and did not chase.  After our blanket trip, someone returned to look for scoters, and a Long-tailed Duck was found (at Chelan Falls State Park).  Others looked for the Long-tailed Duck, and also found Red-throated and Pacific Loons (at Wells Dam).   Ken and Debbie made runs to see the loons, and found Northern Pintails and Bonaparte's Gulls at Walla Walla Point.  

So... If I'd missed my daughter's first basketball game of the year, would I have added some birds to my list.. yeah, but no thanks.  It pains some of the die-hard listers out there to see what seems like such poor planning, or worse, apathy, but these decisions revolve around careful planning, and planning around a few important birds in my life. 

I walked back, had a meal at Taco Time, checked in on the car, then decided to walk it to the Econo Lodge.  I got a room, and I slept.  Finally. 

4:00

I'm picking up my car and looking over the list of possibilities.  Too late to try for Black-backed.  Too little time with light to really try the Columbia.  I decided to head back out to Malaga and Colockum Road in hopes of a Northern Shrike, Rough-legged Hawk, or maybe even something more interesting like a Snow Bunting.  They'd been seen in Seattle, and BirdWeb puts their range map just barely into this area, so I figured it was worth keeping one more eye open for them.

196!

What kind of a jerk even includes a picture like that?  Apparently this kind of jerk.  The Northern Shrike is in there, however, and not too far from where I found Loggerhead Shrike back in May.  I got a nice listen to it as well, before it flew back into the sage.  I tried Colockum Road farther down, but came up empty on any other birds my mind could even think to look for, then returned to town grabbed a bite at Applebee's and crashed crashed crashed for the night.

The guiding thought as I went to bed?  I'd picked up four birds that day, why not four more?

Distant Rain from Colockum Road