More Montlake Fill Birds

These photos are from last Friday when the sun came out, and Truman and I dashed down to my local birding patch, the Montlake Fill.  Now that I'm retired, I get down there around three times a week, and I'm having fun noting the species seen each time.  For instance, the last wigeons I saw were on January 27 (winter migrants heading back north now) and the first swallows I spotted were on February 23 (spring migrants coming up from the south).

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology runs a bird-reporting site called ebird.org where I enter my data for each Fill visit.  It's an incredibly helpful site -- I use it myself when visiting other areas to see what's been reported there lately.  And I hope other birders find my reports on the Fill of some value.  For example, suppose you were visiting from a part of the country without Wood Ducks, and you wanted to see some while you were here.  You'd look up Wood Duck reports on ebird and you could see from my information that they were reliably spotted at the Fill on nine of my last ten visits.

That's exactly what I did when hunting for my first Avocets on a visit to the Tri-Cities years ago. Avocets were regularly reported at the Wallula River Delta -- so off I went, and there they were! Sweet.

Anyway, on to the photos from Friday -- and happy birding to one and all.

A Spotted Towhee tries to hide from me:

Black-capped Chickadees are always at the Fill:

American Goldfinches are here only in Spring and Summer...apparently it's Spring already:

A Bewick's Wren posed nicely for me:

So did this American Robin:

A houseboat was moored on the lake!  I rather suspect this is not entirely legal.

Down at Yesler Cove, a Hooded Merganser floated by:

Truman and I relaxed on one of the benches:

Coming tomorrow:  a few more birds -- this time from Magnuson Park.