Photo of birders courtesy of DRNC
By Bob Boekelheide
On December 18, 2023, OPAS held its 48th annual Sequim-Dungeness Christmas Bird Count (SDCBC). We ended up with 147 species, four species above the average species count for the previous 30 years, but below our all-time record of 154 species in 2015.
Read below to learn more about four interesting birds observed during the SDCBC:
One Bohemian Waxwing occurred this year on the Sequim-Dungeness CBC, seen high in a tree in downtown Dungeness. This is only the fourth time in 48 years that we have recorded Bohemian Waxwings on the Sequim CBC. Very few Bohemian Waxwings have been recorded in western WA this winter.
Bohemian Waxwing. Photo by Bob Boekelheide
A single adult Lesser Black-backed Gull is here for its third straight year on the Sequim-Dungeness CBC. Lesser Black-backed Gulls are birds of the North Atlantic Ocean, Europe, and western Siberia, considered very unusual on the West Coast. This bird really stands out with its dark mantle and wings, yellow legs, light eye color, and smaller size compared to our usual large, pink-legged Glaucous-winged Gulls. This Black-backed Gull roosts at Maple View Dairy and feeds at Washington Harbor, arriving each year in November and departing in March. We'd sure like to know where it goes during the nesting season, since the closest nesting colonies are probably in northern Siberia or Iceland.
Lesser Black-backed Gull roosting with other gulls. Photo by Bob Boekelheide.
We recorded 72 Evening Grosbeaks on this year’s CBC, slightly above average for the last 48 years. Evening Grosbeaks are an irruptive finch species, meaning their populations fluctuate greatly between years, sometimes missing altogether and sometimes noticably abundant.
Female Evening Grosbeak. Photo by Bob Boekelheide
We now think of Mourning Doves as fairly common birds around Sequim, but actually MODOs were quite scarce as recently in the 1970s and 1980s. They were totally missed on eight of the first 20 Sequim-Dungeness CBCs between 1975 and 1994. Their numbers rose steadily through the late 1990s, surpassing 100 birds in 2000, then skyrocketed over the next decade to reach a peak of 487 on the 2009 SDCBC. Then Eurasian Collared-Doves arrived and MODO numbers dropped for several years. Now, with the recent decline in collared-doves, Mourning Dove numbers have soared again this year to their third-highest count ever, with 432 birds. How much competition really exists between collared-doves and Mourning Doves?
Mourning Doves at Schmuck Road. Photo by Bob Boekelheide