This last week was my first week in the state of Washington. My dad and I went there to drop my sister off at her new college, but we stayed there for the birds, since the Pacific is said to be a great place for birding...
...we must have come at the worst time of the year, because there were hardly any birds at all.
We saw the most birds at a great outdoor aviary in Walla Walla, which was filled not only with a variety of native species, but with a lot of exotic birds, like white peacocks, Hawai'ian geese, black-bellied whistling ducks, paradise shelducks, emperor geese, and the spectacular golden pheasant, whose name is hardly an adequate description of its appearance. A more all-inclusive name would be "golden and navy blue and jungle green and bright red and fiery orange and khaki and black and speckled and scaled pheasant". There were also several white peacocks with their chick, as well as a few bobwhites. Oddly, there seemed to be several
white bobwhites.
There was also an odd incident in which a rock dove (or rock pigeon, as they're now called) which had somehow made it into one of the enclosures landed next to two resting surf scoters, a male and a female (little black seagoing ducks, the males have staring white eyes, several white patches on their heads and big red, yellow, white and black bills, while the females are plain brown).
As the rock dove waddled past the male scoter, the scoter noticed him and opened his bill, gaping threateningly at the rock dove, as if he were hissing. The rock dove then approached the female scoter and puffed himself up and started cooing and circling her. For those of you not in the know, this is what a male rock dove does to a female rock dove when he is interested in creating baby rock doves.
The scoter must have been asleep at first, and she started staring blankly at the rock dove. Finally, apparently disgusted with the rock dove's behavior, she got up and walked towards the male scoter. For some reason, as soon as she had done that the rock dove decided to fly off.
When we visited the aviary later, it was dusk, and the birds were bedding down for the night. The white peahens were perched or sitting in various spots, with their chicks huddled under their wings. One of the families was perched on the rail of a bridge inside the aviary, and perched on the railing next to them was a ring-neck dove. The dove seemed to slowly be edging closer to the peahen, as if trying to benifit from the warmth of her body. The first time he tried this, the peahen apparently nudged him away, but he still tried the same trick again.
I wondered about this, since the dove was almost the same size, shape and color as the peahen's chicks. It was almost as if he were attempting to sneak under her wing "disguised" as one of her offspring, as unlikely as such a scheme sounds.
There were also a lot of pheasants in seperate enclosures, and as my dad and I were walking by them, I happened to mention the Temminck's tragopan, and to my amazement, there turned out to be two pairs in a couple of the enclosures. Not surprisingly, we didn't see either of the males doing
this.
On the bright side, though, I did see a few lifebirds, including the very impressive pileated woodpecker. I think I even saw a female warbler feeding a cowbird fledgling, something I've never seen in the wild before (cowbirds are parasitic nesters).
And since I was in Washington, the only state in the lower 48 where the northwestern crow can be found, I might have seen that bird.
Might. I say "might" because the ranges of the northwestern crow and the American crow overlap in WA, and they are somewhat similar -- and I use the word "somewhat" quite liberally.
How do you tell the northwestern crow apart from its southern counterpart? Well, firstoff, it's slightly smaller and slenderer than the American crow (it's hard to detect any difference in size and shape unless you have examples of both species standing side by side), its voice is slightly hoarser (although the American crow has a very wide repitoire of calls), and it prefers tidal habitats (although the American crow can be found just about everywhere but arid climates). Otherwise, the two species are pretty much identical, and as if that weren't bad enough, where their ranges overlap, they frequently hybridize (
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH).
Even my thorough guide to IDing similar bird species apologetically says that there's no real way to tell these two species apart. I never imagined that such a large, common, uniformly colored bird could be such a source of identification confusion.
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