Sisters | Santiam Pass | McKenzie Pass 8/6--BLACK-BACKED WOODPECKER, WHITE-HEADED WOODPECKER + 10 Year Birds

WHITE-HEADED WOODPECKER

We started our day by driving across the road to the parking lot of a fancy Best Western that has bird feeders. We were hoping for a cool woodpecker to come to the suet but dipped on that. Instead, we added Mountain Chickadee, Pygmy Nuthatch, and Lesser Goldfinch. We then went up into the forest, stopping at spots Dave knew and looking up at Ponderosa Pines for birds. Many in the group were sniffing the bark of the Ponderosa Pines, which supposedly smells like vanilla. I gave one spot a whiff. It smelled like tree to me.

I have no clear notion of how many stops we made, or exactly where we were a lot of the time. The internet connection up there in the hills is spotty at best. However, while walking on what eBird identified as the Sisters Tie Trail, we came across one of our target birds, WHITE-HEADED WOODPECKER, which Dave had hoped would be at the Best Western. This was a very exciting sighting for me and though the bird was extremely active, I managed to keep my bins on it and even to get some doc shots of it. Later, it flew behind us and we saw it on a tree with another bird, possibly its mate. 

Dave really wanted us to see a Fox Sparrow, since the sub-species there--Thick-billed Fox Sparrow--is so different from our red sub-species. We finally found one on Forest Service Road 2690, teed up on a stick. While we were admiring that bird, Scott found a little feeding flock of mixed birds, including Orange-crowned Warbler, Yellow-rumped Warbler (Audubon's ssp) and Townsend's Warbler. I missed the Townsend's but got the others. 

Dwight Observatory

We found Green-tailed Towhee on Trout Creek Butte Road, many Lewis' Woodpeckers in the Whispering Pines Campground and then made our way up to McKenzie Pass, where at the top, there is the Dwight Observatory, entirely constructed out of basaltic lava. It overlooks the lava flow from a volanic eruption that occurred 2600 to 2900 years ago. Dave said that the only birds we could expect to see up there were Clark's Nutcrackers, and sure enough, driving down the road he suddenly pulled over when he saw one, which turned into a flock of half a dozen. Better yet, as we drove on, he pulled over again after spotting a woodpecker of some sort. It had flown into an area of dead trees and one of our group re-found it. It was our second lifer of the day, a BLACK-BACKED WOODPECKER. And just to keep it weird, he also spotted a Western Kingbird, far out of its usual habitat. Just migrating through, he assumed.