On Tuesday, September 23, 2015, I decided to make a little excursion over to March Point to see if I could find any migrating terns to photograph. On the way around the Point I discovered Dunlin feeding along the waterline. When I had been in the same area the previous week there was a group of nine, but a with the exception of a single bird preening the rest had been sleeping.

Just off East March Point Road I managed to ‘pish’ a Song sparrow from a blackberry bramble patch. I’ve noted for the past several weeks that nearly all the sparrows I photograph have blackberry juice on their bills!

At the southeast end of East March Point Road I found what I had come for… five or six terns flying back and forth looking for fish. I stayed and photographed the birds for 15-20 minutes but never saw a tern dive into the water. I’m a little unsure of what species of terns these are, but I’m leaning towards Caspian.

The terns finally moved on and about the same time they did I noticed a group of birds fly to the shore a couple of hundred yards in front of me… at an area where I could use my car as a blind and photograph whatever had flown in. I approached the new area and found that a group of Killdeer had flown in and were feeding along the shore. I managed a few photos before they got nervous and moved away.

My route then took me off Fidalgo Island and down Channel Drive, but the only birds I could find to photograph there were a couple of Yellow-rumped warblers who were the recipients of too many ‘twig shadows’ for any kind of photographs to keep.

After running some errands in Burlington and Mount Vernon I returned to March Point and photographed the same birds (except for the terns, which had disappeared) on my return route. It had been a successful outing.

When I arrived back home I unloaded my media card from my camera and stepped out the front door to throw a dropped grape in the area where we commonly have a resident chipmunk. What I thought was a robin flew up from our watercourse but something about it caught my attention. It initially had its back to me but soon turned to face me and I saw immediately that it was a male Varied thrush. Within the past week or so I had been hearing an occasional one on my morning walks in Washington Park. We get them in our yard in the winter but this has to be the earliest date we have ever observed one in the yard. I rushed back in for my camera but of course by the time I returned to the yard the thrush was gone.

I decided to wait awhile to see if the bird would return, and it wasn’t too long after that I saw a large, dark bird enter the madrones at the edge of the yard. A minute or so later a Stellar’s jay, some of which we have been seeing for the past two to three weeks, worked its way down to one of the bird baths for a drink. As I’ve said in past blog posts, the birds are rare here on Cap Sante. This one was apparently alone and I’m fairly certain that it was a juvenile, so I’m hoping that the family (which consisted of 6-8 birds) may have dispersed and that this individual might decide to stay in the area.

I’ve been spending substantial time lately catching up on photo processing.  I’ve had a bounty of photographic opportunities in the yard over the past couple of weeks and I’ve gotten substantially behind on processing the photos.

There photos are ones I took on 9/12/2015.  There are no unusual birds here but I did get what I consider nice photos.

Red-breasted nuthatch…

Male and female Anna’s hummingbirds…

A Chestnut-backed chickadee.  For whatever reason I usually have difficulty getting these birds into good focus.

A post-bath Song sparrow….

And finally, an unidentified raptor that flew overhead while I was monitoring the yard for activity.  I’ll have to ask for some help with the id since I can’t find a raptor that meets all of the characteristics that this one seems to possess.  I’ll try to update the site once I get confirmation of the species.

On Monday, September 14, I received a late morning call from Cap Sante neighbors that they had a Barred owl on their property.  I grabbed by camera and hustled over to find a Barred owl in full view.  As we watched the owl flew to a patch of ground cover near the window, snatched a mouse and then flew to a different limb to devour the creature in a single gulp… which is why we have owl pellets.  Fifty-eight photos later I had all the owl photos I could use for the morning.

At one point when the owl changed perches we saw the wings of another bird flash and we discovered it was an accipiter that briefly harassed the owl.

I arrived back home and glanced out the window at my watercourse just in time to see a pair of Yellow-rumped warblers (Audubon race) so I grabbed my camera again.  They were gone by the time I got outside but I decided to wait awhile.  Eventually a Golden-crowned kinglet showed up at the watercourse.  Bird Notes, on NPR’s nMorning Edition, recently noted that these birds migrate not north and south but between elevations, with the birds breeding at the higher elevations during the spring and summer and returning to the lower elevations for the winter.  The birds only began arriving back at my house (at roughly 100′ elevation!) in the past week or so.

Being a very early riser I was seriously in need of a nap, but yard activity was interesting enough to delay the nap for a little longer.  I was glad I did because the next interesting bird to enter the yard was a Hermit’s thrush, a bird that I might not see in a year of birding, especially in our yard.  I think I remember seeing one on the Cap Sante Overlook early last spring, but I was unable to obtain a photo at the time.

On Monday (9/7/2015) I was able to spend a little more time in the yard and scored on two other yard rarities… a Pacific Slope flycatcher and a Warbling vireo. (I needed help with the verification, but that’s the nice thing about photographs.)

The vireo accessed the watercourse for a bath three times. Like the White-eyed vireo I photograph at my sister’s house outside Austin, Texas, this bird bathes “on the fly”. It skims the water then finds a perch where it preens furiously. Since it staged by the watercourse in various places I was able to get a number of good photographs of it.

And finally, we’ve had a number of juvenile Northern flickers that began frequenting the yard for suet during the past month or so, after a total absence of flickers for the earlier part of the summer.  I have been able to obtain very good photos of the flickers, including this female.

I guess that technically it is still summer, but our weather of late is sliding into fall.  I spent about five hours outside Saturday (9/5/2015) and had a considerable number of photos to show for it.  I photographed two noteworthy visitors… a Stellar’s jay and a Black-throated Gray warbler.  It’s probably been over a year since a Stellar’s jay has visited the yard and I can’t understand why.  We seem to have good habitat.  I’ve often thought that the jays we have make an occasional foray across the channel from Guemes since I have friends over there who have them and I seldom see them on our island (Fidalgo).

The second rarity, the Black-throated Gray warbler, was here for an extended time last summer and usually enjoyed bathing in our watercourse several times a day.  We had probably had them in the past but I probably failed to pick them out of all the Black-capped chickadees, of which we have many.  My guess is that this is a juvenile.  There are at least two in the yard at the same time, and possibly more.

Other birds I photographed… a male Anna’s hummingbird and a White-crowned sparrow.