12 Jan Whiter Shade of Pale in the Okanagan
Posted from Seattle WA on Jan 12, 2025
If you head north these days in Central Washington state you notice it gets whiter as you go, first the tops of the hills and mountains, then everything, and sometimes you can throw in fog. I suggested the fog is new and a result of climate change but that was laughed away by one our friends who is a long-time Okanagan Bird and Nature expert last year.
The Sharp-tailed Grouse was perhaps our top target for this trip. This is a bird that used to have a 20-per-day bag limit but now is listed in the state. When the ground gets covered in snow, they head for the River Birch trees and eat catkins. We saw about 29 in two places.
But let’s back up a bit. We headed over the pass and kept going on I-90 because Delia and I, especially I, hate driving Bluitt Pass and that includes as a passenger.. We were delighted to see the number of American Kestrels along I-90 in Kittitas County and counted 41 before we got to Omak. This guy was at Bridgeport. We also had 5 Rough-legged Hawks among the most common of all Raptors there, the adaptable Red-tail.
Practically our first bird out of Omak on Thursday morning was this young Golden Eagle. She flew out along the cliff revealing telltale white patches in her wing showing her to be a sub-adult.
There were views when the fog lifted and they were often surprising. I think I took this shot out of the window on the way up from Omak. Don’t tell Trump but up there, you can’t be sure a mountain isn’t Canadian.
On Siwash Creek we found this female White-headed Woodpecker, looking spiffy on one of our most beautiful trees, a Ponderosa Pine. A male would have had red on the nape.
After searching in vain for days for Ruffed Grouse in the waning months of 2024 we were delighted to run into a number of them in the riparian zone in the Okanagan highlands, doing the same thing as the Sharp-tails. Ruffed Grouse may have the proportionately longest tails of any Grouse, Sharp-tails the shortest.
As is the custom when birders visit the Okanagan in winter, we searched the fog-drenched Havilla Snow Park for Great Gray Owls, which, unlike other Owls, can hear voles under the snow and punch down below even crusted snow to 36″ and so are extremely unpopular among the Vole community. Birders do find this bird there, I have been on a number of trips where we did not.
But in other parts of the County we did find other Owls, four species for the trip, Northern Saw-whet, shown here, Northern Pygmy, Barred and Great Horned Owl.
This is the Northern Pygmy Owl, a bird-specialist that is less nocturnal, if it is nocturnal at all, than other Owls.
This can be what birding in the Okanagan can be like, You don’t hike on trails, the snow is too deep. You can walk the road if somebody is willing to drive. That’s Delia and Heather following Brian and Darchelle I believe or Marcus. Marcus told us that as a young man he was a counselor at a camp and all the 6 male counselors were named Mark. They were told by the Director to all come up with a different name by the next morning. I don’t know if I’m supposed to spread these facts, but it’s probably safe– I call this blog “My Secret Place.”
White-breasted Nuthatches bring joy wherever they go, There were many Red-breasted Nuthatches and they were looking spectacular in Snow and Ponderosa Pine-provided still-lifes, but I couldn’t get those shots.
Well, I did get this one female in Pine boughs. It’s a different scale when you are a Nuthatch and an Oldgrowth Ponderosa Pine must seem like a city to a Nuthatch.
And I guess I got this male Red-breasted Nuthatch that was going up and ran out of tree.
We found a Northern Shrike, which is a predatory songbird, making a go of things in the snow. This is a very Northern Bird that is used to snow and cold, so we tried not to feel sorry for it out there.
On Wednesday on the trip into Omak Delia and I had failed to find this Yellow-billed Loon in the Okanagan River, which had been reported for some time. Luckily Darchelle and Brian and Heather and Marcus all found it and with this amazing new technology called cellular telephones we were alerted. We were only a half-mile up the river, so of course we came down to see it. They informed us it had just caught a large fish which may explain why he or she sailed down river not diving and looking very contented and happy, as is shown here.
We ran into a really nice farmer up there and he said he had seen some of these. Sure enough, around a couple more bends we ran into a flock of Snow Buntings. These birds can have an ethereal quality which is also captured well by my slightly out-of-focus photography. Truly a gorgeous bird.
I forgot
This shot is here for two reasons. I didn’t get any shots of Brian and Darchelle this time and I thought color might be refreshing after a two-tone all-winter-colored blog. Brian and Darchelle continue their incredible journey in life which I blogged about on these pages after their 2023 BigYear. After ending 2024 in a three-way tie for birds seen (observed) in Washington with the indomitable Maxine Reid, Brian and Darchelle are off to another roaring Bigyear. They operate as a team bigyearing although the relentless depredations of ALS make it impossible for Brian to move on his own, and Darchelle seems powered by an otherworldly ability to handle so many tasks. And Brian, who ran 230 marathons in his life, is still the best spotter I know.. It is shocking that we will drive along a road and pass by birds that we don’t see and see their green Suburu stopped and get a call to hurry back for some rarity. It is hard for Delia and I to wrap our minds around how good of a spotter (and this includes audio-spotting, hearing and identifying birds by sound) Brian is. And Darchelle, who brought no previous experience with birding to the table, is now unbelievably erudite in her knowledge of birds and birding. I need to thank this unit–Delia and I think of them that way– although we of course honor their individuality–for shining a path forward on how to live life when things don’t go perfectly, or anywhere near perfectly. This shot was from August on a Pelagic trip. By the way, we don’t give up hoping for miracles. For the first 8 or ten years Brians medical path downhill with ALS followed the normal pattern but then it flatlined.
Speaking of Brian and Darchelle, Darchelle got much better shots of the 5 Pine Grosbeaks we found in Winthrop and maybe I’ll borrow one of her shots for this blog, For now, mine will have to make do.
Northern Goshawk is probably the least-often-seen-by-humans of the North American diurnal raptors. This awful photo is of a scruffy juvenile bird, but this sighting that Delia and I had on the Okanagan River on the way home is actually the first time we have ever seen one perched. (They often fly by at speed but also can be occasionally seen doing afternoon-soaring. Once we were near a nest and had a big adult female fly low between us in Arizona–that was a heartstopping moment as the adults are blue gray with dark cap and they can make a huge racket when you are near their nest.) This bird sat near a Bald Eagle–until it saw something below it and dove for the ground in a big hurry, and we did not relocate it. The six of us saw another bird in the highlands and Brian and Darchelle saw that one again or another bird, so it was a good Goshawk trip.
On the trip home we left the Okanagan but went back up to the high plateau on Cameron Lake Road looking for Gray Partridges. Do you see any Gray Partridges here? Neither did we. We were glad to get back down because now we were driving a street car, a Prius, and not riding in Heather and Marcus’s SUV anymore. This is a place people also go to look for Gyrfalcons which we also missed, as do most birders, that’s a tough bird in WA..
However, all was not lost. We headed south for the next stretch of high country, the Waterville Plateau, which though snow-covered had paved roads that had been plowed. We discovered a little secret that Bird chasers have been trying to tell us–some of the Gray Partridges have given up on homesteading in the outback and are living a life of urban bliss in towns like Mansfield and Withrow. These birds were among a flock of at least 37 living it up in Withrow. Despite spending all their time in the oompany of humans, they have maintained a bit of their fear of our species and whenever we came upon the flock in this small town, the birds made a point of flying, running, or walking away fast from us, as these three birds are doing.
As light was getting low we headed up the long incline from Wanapum Dam to the top of Naneum Ridge and witnessed a Rough-legged Hawk drop in for a Vole. There was of course no photo but it was a great last mental picture before we said good bye to our late, great, 2025 Whiter-Shade-of-Pale trip to Washington’s Arctic!
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