Probable Sedge Wren in E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area and other Airlie-Albany CBC finds

[Joel Geier]

Happy New Year, all!

In today's coverage for the Airlie-Albany CBC, my daughter Martha and I walked numerous roads in the north half of E.E. Wilson Wildlife Area.

Mostly we found birds expected for the season, but toward the end we ran across what we think was probably a Sedge Wren. This was in a wet spot along the road that runs directly north from headquarters, about a mile until you get to an old shed (which is starting to sag now) with a Barn Owl nest box on the west end.

The bird that we saw was about 150 yards south of that shed, on the west side of the road. We flushed it twice and both times only saw it in flight for distances of a few tens of yards, no vocalizations, before it ducked into some "kack" around an old WW II military building foundation, and didn't surface again.

Key points were that it was really tiny and sickly-yellowish-tinged on the back, rather than more rufous as a Marsh Wren would be or brownish like any other expected wren. I recall, a decade or so ago when a couple of Sedge Wrens were found wintering in this same area in successive winters, they were sometimes difficult to separate from first-winter Marsh Wrens. But this bird was outside the bounds of what I remember from those encounters (and I've also seen Sedge Wrens back in northwest Minnesota).

Earlier in the day we also hiked up the Coffin Butte trail and scoped the 700 or so gulls on the landfill. An adult Peregrine Falcon and several Bald Eagles kindly kept the gull flock stirred up, so each time the whole flock lifted up we could try to estimate their numbers, and scope new birds once they settled down. Along with the expected Glaucous-winged, Herring, and a few Thayer's (Iceland) Gulls plus many hybrids we eventually saw one very clean adult Western Gull, but that was all. I was surprised that we couldn't find even a single representative of the smaller gull species (California, Ring-billed, or Mew). We also couldn't spot any good candidates for Glaucous Gull, or anything rarer than that.

We had good luck on pre-dawn owling, with Western Screech-Owls singing away at Wells Landing (always the best spot for this count) and down by the Rogue Brewery Hop Farm in American Bottom. Barn Owls shrieked at us out of the darkness both at Wells Landing and at the cemetery in the hill south of Independence, where I was hoping (unsuccessfully) for a Saw-whet on the adjacent Xmas-tree farm. What is it about Barn Owls that they hate Saw-whet Owl impersonations so much? When we stopped back at our house for breakfast as dawn's rosy fingers were just reaching above the horizon (literary credit to Mr. Homer), I saw something fly up onto a tree that didn't look right for a hawk, so I grabbed my binoculars and confirmed that it was a Barred Owl.

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Joel Geier

Camp Adair area north of Corvallis