Thursday, in a somewhat unusual strategy prompted by morning commitments for both myself and Bruce, Ken Brown, Bruce Labar and I headed for Yakima from Bruce’s house at 11:15 AM with the White-winged dove as our target species. It had been seen the prior 2 days at the backyard feeders of Kevin Lucas in Selah, Yakima County. We got there about 2 PM after a quick stop at the Selah Rest Area where a pair of Prairie falcons sallied off their nest long enough to add one to Bruce’s WA year list and to my Yakima County life eBird list. No Canyon wrens though.
When we arrived at Kevin’s place he graciously led us to his back room where feet from a window were feeders of all types, a water element with several drinking fountain type spigots running, and lots of doves. ECDO and MODOs were nearly constantly switching positions from the Sycamore tree to the feeders to the power wires and so forth. Kevin explained the usual approach of the WWDO and we waited. After about 2 hours Bruce, from his Yoga cross-legged sit on the floor looking up into the tree spotted the WWDO. It commenced to feed at all of the feeders for about 20 minutes, giving us a great show and photo ops. It turns out that this was the last time the birds has been seen as of Saturday evening. Nothing like luck when a chase is involved.
We left the WWDO and headed for Wenas Creek in hopes of getting the Indigo bunting male that has been singing there for a few weeks. He did not disappoint us as we found it in the tall grass near the creek.
From there followed a look for previously reported Long-eared owls near a nest on the Umptatum Road pines (no luck), tries at several locations for Canyon wren which we finally found at Bear Creek Canyon along with singing Common Poorwill and Common Nighthawk. We ended the day with a search for Flamulated Owl at Bethyl Ridge without success and the long drive down Hwy 12 and across Hwy 7 to Tacoma. I got home about 2:30 AM tired but happy after a great day of birding with good buddies.