Shorebirds, or charadriiformes, are birds that like shores.  The end.  Wait, no, they may have evolved in and prefer shores, but some get farther afield.  Seagulls are the most familiar, but little brown sandpipery things are also familiar to most of us.  Hard to identify and incredibly diverse at that.  Seagulls stray pretty far from shore, crisscrossing the continent to eat garbage.  Also found inland are killdeers.

Killdeers are more of those little brown sandpipery things.  They have bold black and white horizontal striping on their head and neck, but it doesn’t look at all bold from fifteen feet away.  Instead it serves to break up their shape, make them very hard to see.  Effective camouflage, which is why you see it on everything from badgers to nuthatches.  They have a big blood red eye, but still, nice looking little birds.

They sing “killdeer, killdeer, killdeer,” and I feel like I’ve only ever heard them do that song when in flight?  They live in scrubby fields, nesting in tall grass.  Unfortunately, fields get mowed, so they probably face a lot of tragedies.  Sometimes they’ll live in a parking lot, where grass grows in the cracks at the edges, and again, if a new tenant decides to make something proper of the location, bye-bye killdeers.

I used to see them in the abandoned lot across the street from the Federal Way Transit Center, but that field was converted into a well manicured park, and I haven’t seen them there since.  I saw one on a little trail by the WinCo in Federal Way, and I’ve seen them near a shore up by the Canadian border, on a bird watching trip.  I’ve heard them before dawn or after dusk near my old workplace in Auburn and even in my apartment complex in Federal Way.  Would not be surprised to hear them by my condo, tho I haven’t yet.

For all that, they’re still not a very common sighting for me – now.  I used to see huge flocks of them, a long time ago, when I had no idea what they were.  Auburn is a town cut in half by a big wide train yard.  Just a few over- and under- passes get you past those tracks.  They’re hopping these days, but when I was young, back in the 1990s, they were less busy, less well maintained.  The yard had little activity and little security.  When walking home from a friend’s house at three in the morning, or from watching a movie at the mall, I would sometimes walk along A Street by that train yard, or walk across it.  And there were so many killdeers there.

I can ID them years after the fact because I remembered their call.  They’d run around on the ground or take flight in fear of me, or stray breezes, or just for fun.  I didn’t understand what they were doing; still don’t.  Before I saw them running, I’d even thought are those bats?  Is the killdeer call echolocation?  I could only see them in the distance, drab and flappy.  I didn’t know much of anything back then.

Anyway, next time you’re in an abandoned parking lot or crappy gravel pit or funky field, anywhere USA, if you see a lil brown shorebird flap and killdeer away, pay your respects.

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In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

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In the Pacific Northwest of the USA, it’s mostly true that most of our birds are drab as hell.  You want a red-ass red bird, you gotta head east of the mountains.  The Puget Sound isn’t where color goes to die, but it’s close.  It’s where color goes to take a restless nap under fungus-hued clouds.  The famous red on a migratory thrush‘s breast is fine.  It can look good under the right light.  Nothing on a cardinal tho.

The american robin’s cousin the varied thrush is easily the fanciest thrush in Washington, with more than a red breast.  It’s streaked with black and orange, like a local oriole wannabe (less bright than that bird of course; gotta stay grunge).  I’ve seen them on my porch, seen ’em in a tree, back at the old apartment complex.  Doubt I’ll see them at my new home.  In all, fewer than five sightings.  When I look them up on the web, it is said they are “common.”  Not in my experience.

I know nothing about them except that they are thrushes, they look cool, and I felt lucky to see them.  I often struggle to remember their name, wanting to call them “painted thrushes” for some reason.  What do you know about varied thrushes?

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