Birders --
While typing away at my laptop in the front yard in Multnomah Village, SW
Portland, this morning I heard a harsh scratchy chickadee call. Mindful of the
recent reports of low-elevation Mountain Chickadees, I went to investigate.
Instantly I thought I heard a second such call, and then possibly a third. A
couple of birds streamed out of one tree and into another. Soon I found myself
looking through binoculars at one, two, three, four, five MOUNTAIN CHICKADEES
foraging together in a pine across the street. More bird shapes moved through
the needles behind them. One additional Mountain Chickadee called from another
tree off to the right and two more called from off to the left. I kept lifting
my binoculars, and every single bird I looked at in the pine tree was a
Mountain Chickadee; there were certainly more than five in the tree. I saw one
RB Nuthatch join them, but otherwise I counted at least eight Mountain
Chickadees in that pine tree, including the calling one from the right that had
flown into it. Together with the two calling from the left that were now moving
away down the street, that made ten. And this was a conservative count; I am
pretty sure there were additional birds obscured behind foliage, or that had
already moved away down the street.
I then made the mistake of running back into the house to grab my camera, and
of course this was the time the flock chose to leave the tree and flee north up
the street. I got one lousy photo of the last bird in the tree, then tried my
best to follow the flock. I managed to re-find three of them and follow them a
bit about a block away, but never re-found the entire flock to get a full
count. But at least ten, wow! ... We had one or two birds for a while during
the last invasion fall a couple of years ago, but I never thought I'd see a
flock of multiple individuals like this. I'll be interested to see if they
stick around the neighborhood, but they appeared to be simply bombing through
at high speed.
To harken back to some of the discussions we had last time around, anyone able
to get good photos of Mtn Chickadees in the lowlands might help shed light on
their geographic origins, i.e., whether these are birds from the nearest
Cascades populations or whether they are leapfrogging from further away.
I had wanted to get to the coast this morning to look for Black-vented
Shearwaters, but work deadlines dashed those hopes. Perhaps it's a fortunate
thing; as nice as it would have been to have added another notch on my state
list, the utterly shocking experience of encountering this unexpected chickadee
flock was actually far more exciting. Sometimes, as Dorothy said, there's no
place like home.
Jay Withgott
SW Portland
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