Bird Watching Carnation WA April 7

Transcribed from April 7 notes.
Time: 630-830 am

Weather this morning was perfectly sunny, and hot for the beginning of april, the 630am weather reflected the day that it would turn into, but at the time was more chilly and full of bird calls. There were a few bird calls that stood out to me most recognizeable. A spirally trill which always came from the very top branches of one of the 27 yr old douglas fir trees, which is best described as spirally because of the way it started with slower intervals of notes and quickly sped up and then slowed and then sped up in a spiraled fashion, also fluctuating in pitch it seemed. I now think that that call belongs to an american gold finch, because I kept seeing the gold breast and black mask of one of them when it shifted its body so that the reflection of the sun would make it more clear against the background sky which often makes it hard to see faraway birds clearly even with binoculars. Another recognizeable call was the loud individual cheaping of the flicker which i saw one time in the top of a nearby douglas fir, but haven't got a photo of yet. The flicker had a long beak that curved slightly downwards, and a clearly black spotted white breast, it was just a fraction smaller than a common crow by estimation. A common call coming from multiple birds this morning that hang around in the canopy of both evergreens and bare deciduous trees was that of the black capped chickadee. The call was very brief series of cheaps that were much shorter than the flicker, they were also much more common and there was often multiple birds calling from the same tree. The black capped chickadee is recognizeable by a white mask over its cheeks expanding as it reaches the back of its head, with a black chin and a black cap; very small birds, white and sometimes yellowy breast, dark and top of tail. There was also the crow like call of the spotted towhee, and there were dark eyed juncos but i didnt recognize their calls.The last call i can recall but didnt identify was always coming from nearby objects on the forest floor, and it can i think be accurately described as sounding similar to a rotating ratcheted wrench, because it sounds very close to the sound made when you turn a ratchet around a bolt with the clicking noise, the bird was small and brown camoflauged all over its body.

The habitat in this location in carnation WA (about 450ft elevation south facing hill less than a mile from the tolt river to the south) is a western hemlock and western redcedar vegetation that was logged in 1985 by weyerhaueser and replanted densely with douglas-fir, which is currently the dominant species, although pockets of multi stemmed bigleaf maple create big zones on inhibition in the doug fir canopy due to their vast circular canopy. There are many hemlocks and western redcedars also, but they do not appear to be as old as the douglas-firs. The understory shrubbery consists of many of the common native plants in western hemlock vegetation: sword fern, salmon berry, salal, vine maple, himalayan blackberry in anthropogenic open areas, herb robert, bracken fern in the summer time but not today in early april, red huckleberry, etc. The plot is a sold off division of old logging land, the larger environment is the same thing, each subdivision being continuous for the most part except for frequent logging roads and increasing human presence.

Species list (for now)
western hemlock vegetation young forest, canopy not closed.

Publicado el 01 de mayo de 2012 por robertmarsh