SOUTH-WESTERN OREGON
Four Days in May - Day Three
Monday June 25, 2009
Sunday had been an eighteen hour day. So we started “late” on Monday. After all it was Memorial Day, a holiday. Brunch at the Fullers’ house, overlooking the garden bird-feeders, 9am start. There were the usual suspects in the garden that day: Lesser Goldfinch, Siskins, Steller’s Jays, Mourning Doves. The Grosbeaks, of course, were singing in the treetops.
By late morning we’d torn ourselves away from the scrumptious spread produced by Mrs. Fuller and went hunting for Mr. Macgillivray. This skulking warbler was more sensed than seen. A flitting presence in dense brush, that may have looked us over, then vanished. Not even seen clearly enough for an ID. A Spotted Towhee came into the clearing to inspect the band of birders. Nashville Warblers, Lazuli Bunting, up front and visible.
Then we headed uphill to Mount Ashland south of town. We lunched along the road where there were no birds in the forest beyond a screaming Pileated that we could not see. But after he left the car at the edge of the ski lodge parking lot, and walked beyond the locked gate: birds! We didn’t find a Townsend’s Solitaire nor Mountain Bluebird, and no Gray Jays. But there were good views of singing Green-tailed Towhee (above, left), more than one Hermit Warbler, and a singing Lincoln’s Sparrow (above, right) hugging the meadow canopy, perched atop a two-foot high globe of limbs too flexible to have been crushed by the winter snow.
We also spotted a nonchalant Dusky Flycatcher (below). He was far more interested in small insects than a herd of large lumbering mammals.
TOWHEE.NET: Harry Fuller, 820 NW 19th Street, McMinnville, OR 97128
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