Today Marian and I spent most of the day birding the Waterville Plateau in Douglas County, WA. This is a great winter birding place in eastern WA, known for its raptors, flocks of winter birds-of-open-country and, when it’s not foggy or snowing, beautiful days. Today met the latter criteria nicely. We are staying in Marian’s time share condo in Manson near Chelan, and so it a 35-40 minute drive up McNeil Canyon to the plateau. Most of the time when I get to bird this area it is after a drive from Pierce County, usually with our ABCbirding group, so getting their bu 8:30 AM and not getting up early was a treat. The morning was clear and overcast, really perfect visibility conditions. On the drive up onto the plateau we had a great look at a juvenile Golden Eagle who flew right overhead, at lots of Rough-legged Hawks, and got excited about a clear fog-free day ahead.

We did a more-or-less loop around much of the plateau, starting with a drive south to Mansfield, with stops at the Lamoine Windbreak for a walk all the way around the line of trees. ALmost no birds were found there, no owls, no raptors, and no sparrows so a nice walk and stretch to start the day, but fun to show Marian the area, and the snow levels were perfect. Deep enough to cover the ground, but not to make walking difficult.

Mansfield yielded little, with no partridge or falcons at the grain elevators, and I decided to explore some new roads. I drive up onto Rd. D NW northwest of Mansfield, yielded our only American Tree Sparrows of the day near a farmhouse there. I dropped the eBird pin at the spot for relocation purposes.

The rest of the day was really driving around looking for birds. We came across many 20-600 bird flocks of Horned Larks with a good mix of Snow Buntings in most of them. My guess was 3-5% of all the birds overall in these flocks were SNBU. It was fun to refamiliarize myself with their calls, and know the buntings were there before starting to look.
The Heritage Road area for LEOW was burned badly from last summer’s fires, and it does not look like a great stop going forward. We ended the day as fog rolled in near Atkin’s Lake where we found one of the two Snowy Owls Shep Thorpe had found last week. It was Marian’s first SNOW in what she thought was the wild, the Seattle bird last week seeming like a city bird to her.
We quit about 3 PM as fog started to roll in which along with loss of light made viewing really poor.

A really pretty day, with a few winter specialties but overall slow birding.

Good birding and good day!