Central Washington Birding Trip Report: Part 1

Our trip started well, easily finding our first target species, Gray Catbird at Hyak, WA. This species is a noted vocalist, one of the mimic thrashers, and sings a highly varied jumble of repeated notes. In this photo you can see the major field marks, the gray color, the slightly de-curved bill, the black cap, and the reddish undertail coverts.

Ken Brown and I headed out at noon yesterday June 6th on a trip to central and south central Washington in hopes of finding several species we had not yet seen in 2018. In addition of course, we expected to have fun we always do when birding together.
Our first stop was at Hyak, near Snoqualmie Summit in hopes of finding a Gray Catbird, and we succeeded quickly with great views.
From there we headed for the Teanaway area. On our drive through this beautiful area we found a singing Nashville Warbler, and stopped at the Teanaway River Bridge in hopes of finding a Bank Swallow. No luck on the swallow, so we headed towards the Middle Fork of the Teanaway River in hopes of finding an area where Black-backed and Northern Three-toed Woodpeckers had been seen recently. We had trouble locating the exact area, and had no luck on finding woodpeckers of any sort.

We did see this singing Lazuli Bunting. It's song is loud, strident, and seems to fool me over and over, as I often misidentify it when I hear it. As you might guess, once seen ID is not difficult.

From here we headed toward Ellensburg, and drove on Umptatum Road to the Wenas Creek Campground where we spent the night. There is a well maintained bluebird trail on this road, and we saw lots of both Mountain and Western Bluebirds.

The sky-blue all over male Mountain Bluebird is always awesome.

Western Bluebirds are a darker blue color on the back, wings and tail, and as you can see have a reddish breast and white belly.

From here we birded our way to the campground, and got camp set up. By then it was almost dark, and we headed to Dry Creek Road to look for night birds including owls, nightjars and nighthawks. As we set up camp four geese flew overhead calling. They were clearly not Canada Geese, our common breeding goose, and there is no body of water near where we were camping. They circled back, and we got better looks, as well as some poor-quality photos in the waning light. They were Snow Geese, all white with black wing tips, a completely unexpected species for this date.

A crappy photo taken, as often birders do, for documentation of an unexpected sighting of these Snow Geese.

Conditions were perfect, with fairly warm weather, almost no wind, and no rain. As it started to get dark we started to hear Common Nighthawks calling and saw them flying overhead. They also make a loud "booming" sound from their wings when they dive rapidly downward, and we heard this over and over all evening. It sounds like the horn of a semi-tractor truck.

Next Common Poorwills started calling, and like many night-jars they are named after their call, saying "poor-WILL" emphasis on the will syllable which is energetically projected.

Soon thereafter a Western Screech-owl started calling, and this was followed by a Flamulated Owl tooting. We ended up hearing two of each of these species, as well as two drumming Ruffed Grouse. I hope to post an audio recording of some of these sounds soon.

We headed to bed, as I am going to do now. I plan to post a summary of day 2 of this trip as soon as I can, hopefully tomorrow.

For now, good birding. Steem on.