Negative on suspected E.E. Wilson Sedge Wren this morning

[Joel Geier]

Just back from a 2-hour walk at E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area, with about an hour of that spent walking wet patches of the grassy fields around where my daughter Martha and I twice flushed a small, yellowish, weak-flying wren that I suspect was a Sedge Wren, during our coverage of the area for the Airlie-Albany CBC on Sunday.

This morning I saw an assortment of sparrows (mainly Song and Lincoln's) in that area, heard a Bewick's Wren in a dense thicket to the north, and a Pacific Wren called once from a more wooded area to the south. A nice flock of 15+ WESTERN BLUEBIRDS also flew in to forage in the field to the northeast.

But I didn't see anything resembling what we saw on Sunday. So, unless someone else manages to go out there in the next few days and re-find the bird, we'll need to leave it as "Cistothorus wren sp." with Marsh Wren as the main alternative.

On my way back I checked a few wetlands that we didn't manage to cover on count day, hoping to add a Swamp Sparrow for count week, but I came up empty on those. I did find a couple more Marsh Wrens and one HERMIT THRUSH (a species that we missed on count day, but other teams managed to find).

The whole time that I was out there (from about 7:30 to 9:30), GULLS were constantly flying in toward Coffin Butte Regional Landfill, in clumps of 10 to 50. Surprisingly nearly all of them were flying in from the northeast, from the direction of Salem, rather from Albany. As on Sunday when I estimated a total of about 700 gulls on the landfill, they all seemed to be of the larger, "pink-footed" types of gull.

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Joel Geier

Camp Adair area north of Corvallis