My “life list” as a birder is unremarkable, but the wee beasties make me feel some type of way, so I thought, articles about them.  First entry…

I always liked nature, liked birds, but I somehow just didn’t pay attention to them – at least, not enough to notice just how many were around me, what they looked like, acted like, sounded like.  I’d see chickadees one month and by the time I took any note of another bird, forgot enough that I assumed house sparrows were the same species – then not noticed another bird for two years.

The first bird that sparked an abiding interest for me, at about age thirty, was the northern flicker – a very humble woodpecker.  Most woodpeckers in North America are bold black and white, with pure red flashes.  Flickers and their cousins are a tawny brown, where the black and white on them turn into “cryptic” camouflage, and the red ranges from rust colored to salmon to yellow, in the eastern end of their range.  Dull.  But still.

I used to see a brown bird on the ground with red bits and assume it was just an american robin (i’d rather call ’em the anglicization of their binomial, “migratory thrush,” because bitches do not look like real robins).  Until one day, I saw one of those birds take off, and reveal red all over the bottoms of its wings – then proceed to land on the side of a tree, in a way that was impossible for robins.  I stalked that bird all around Meridian Playground in Wallingford, hoping to get a better view, but the cryptic plumage and nervous demeanor kept it out of reach.

I went home and scoured the internet until I got my ID.  Despite my having never noticed them, they are extremely common.  There are no doubt tens of thousands of them in the region, maybe hundreds of thousands.  When you come to recognize their CHEEE! call, you realize how many there are, whether you see them or not.  And they aren’t that hard to see, because unlike most of the woodpeckers here, they feed near or on the ground.  I’ve seen them in the middle of a paved expanse, no trees in sight, flicking moss out of a sidewalk crack to get bugs.  They’re everywhere.  How did I miss them?

Now I try not to miss birds.  To honor the northern flicker, I got one tattooed on my left shoulder.  Still haven’t been able to get it colored.  Speaking of which, as plain as they are, they really are very cute.  They have these brilliant black polka-dots, a black crescent bib, red teardrop shapes sliding off their cheeks, and of course, the red under their wings.  Most birds are pale under the wing, for countershading, so it’s very cool to see a bird buck that trend in bold style – even if the red isn’t as pure as it is in their flashier cousins.  Compared to a lot of other brown birds, they are more tawny and pale, which makes their eyes look more dark and sweet.  They are about the same size as an american robin, but as woodpeckers, can easily move around on the sides of trees.  Powerful feet with two toes facing forward and two back.

I haven’t gone as deep into describing all the cool details about them as I could.  Check them out sometime, if you can.  Northern flickers.  Cool guys.

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There’s this stretch of 320th Street in Federal Way, a bit east of I-5, just business parks trees and gas stations.  Probably just a bit out of sight is water – tiny plots of wetland maintained by the city, maybe a little lake?  I don’t know the neighborhood that well, but I pass through it a lot.

Anyway, for the second time I have seen these birds I cannot identify.  It’s hard to get a good look at them when driving past, even from my spot in the passenger seat.  I see them flying over the street or near it, thirty to sixty feet up, in a tight formation of several birds.  Colorwise and regionwise, I would assume glaucous-winged gull.  After all, just west of the highway at the mall, they’re so numerous that I imagine they’re nesting.  These are very white birds.  I feel like a glimpsed just a little streak of black from the coverts or the body.

But their wings are too short, their wingbeats too fast.  Not waterfowl fast, but close.  Maybe they fly more like big gulls when they get to higher altitude.  Still, they have me so flummoxed I looked up all the waterfowl with white bodies.  My views of them have been so fleeting I think it’s possible I missed a dark head or legs.  But all the significantly white ducks have too much black on their wings, couldn’t be them.

I’ve even thought, a flock of white pigeons?  They are smaller than glaucous-winged gulls, but I think still too large to be pigeons.  After all that, I am thinking they are one of the smaller gull species, like ring-billed.  I can’t rule out tern, but again, don’t most terns have very long wings?

The reason I was so specific with the location is that if, by chance, an expert birder remembers driving through that spot, and what they saw there, this might be an easy answer.  If I can’t work it out, I’m just going to have to commit a day of my life to camping out at the side of a busy road with the hobos, and watching the sky.

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