I just experienced a remarkable coincidence.  I ended my last post mentioning the Pacific Slope flycatcher we saw in California and just this week I had one show up in my yard.  I’ll leave the details and photos to a future post, but in the meantime I want to finish addressing CA photos.

I just noticed that in my last post I failed to post any photos of the Pacific Slope flycatcher… and no one mentioned it to me.  It just shows you how many people pay any attention to these posts!  Here are a few of the many photos of the flycatcher I took:

Photos of Western Scrub jays that we encountered at various locations around the refuge…

This female California quail had a covey of chicks that she mostly kept out of sight in the scrub…

A White-crowned sparrow singing…

(note:  I originally mistakenly identified this as a Song sparrow.)

A Barn swallow perched on a barbed wire fence beside the road…

And finally, a pair of doves for comparison.  The first is a Mourning dove and the one below it is a Eurasian Collared dove, coming soon to a location near you!  (The Eurasian Collared doves are an introduced species and are rapidly spreading into the Skagit County (and probably other) areas.