Birding the Washington Coast Day 1

Lesser Yellowlegs Tringa flavipes
Tuesday July 24th Ken Brown and I headed for the coast on a 2 day birding trip. We planned to spend the first day birding primarily in Pacific County, including Bottle Beach, Tokeland, Midway Beach and some upland areas. We started the day at a place we had not birded before on a side road just before the John's River bridge. The eBird address was 30 Game Farm Road, Aberdeen, WA. There is a parking area, and a dirt road along the marsh beside the north side of the river off Hwy 105. It turned out to be fairly birdy as we got there about 8:10 AM and we managed 27 species there, including nice looks at a Black-throated Gray Warbler, Downy Woodpecker, and what seemed like a Song Sparrow on every bush.

Some of the shorebirds at Bottle Beach.

Next stop was at Bottle Beach on the incoming tide. We hit this area just right, and a good number of shorebirds were present for this time of year. It is still early in fall migration for shorebirds, but we estimated about 700-800 shorebirds present. On the walk in we got great looks at the Lesser Yellowlegs in the photo at the top of this post. Other highlights were 3 Red Knots, and an estimated 5-600 Short-billed Dowitchers.

At Tokeland we saw the 10 Western Willets that have already returned. The dayt was foggy overall, and we battled fog for much of the rest of the day. We went to Midway Beach, and took a drive on t he sand managing to get looks at two fo the breeding Snowy Plovers. We explored some back roads up into the hills east of Hwy 105 in Pacific County looking for Pacific County birds we had not seen for our eBird county lists, but it was pretty slow by the 3-5 PM time we slotted for this attempt. I added just Black-throated Gray Warbler, Band-tailed Pigeon, Pacific Slope Flycatcher and Swainson's Thrush to my list, bringing it to 159.

We then went on to Westport for a Mexican Restaurant for dinner, and then to Westhaven State Park and the Westport Marina, where fog made birding very difficult. We did manage Black and Ruddy Turnstones at the base of the jetty, but surprisingly missed Marbled Godwit in the marina.

The Lesser Yellowlegs at Bottle Beach was by far the most photogenic bird of the day so I'll finish with a couple more shots of it.

Good birding. Steem on!