Over the last week I’ve had the chance to get out twice with friends, last Friday June 30 with Ken Brown, and yesterday with Bruce LaBar.
On Friday Ken and I headed for Mt. Rainier via Paradise. It was my first trip to the mountain this year, and I hoped to add to my Pierce County year list. Ken met at my house at 6 AM and we drove straight to the Paradise parking lot, finding one of the few parking spaces still available. We had a great day with beautiful weather and managed 25 species. There was lots of bird song on the hike up, with Olive-sided Flycatcher, Pine Siskin (unbelievably the FOY for Washington State for me as it’s been a siskin free winter here.) Sooty Grouse and good numbers of White-crowned Sparrows and Chipping Sparrows. There was only a modest amount of snow on the trails, and we took the Panarama Point trail up to where it meets the Pebble Creek Trail just before Panarama Point. We added my county first Townsend’s Solitaire along with American Pipits as we approached the Pebble Creek Trail where a week earlier Heather and Marcus had found White-tailed Ptarmigan. We didn’t find the ptarmigan but found Bruce, Heather and Marcus at a lunch stop there. While eating we found a distant perched Gray-crowned Rosy Finch, and another solitaire landed behind us. We explored the area hoping for ptarmigan without success and walked down as a group of 5.
On Monday Bruce and I visited a new road out Greenville looking for Black-backed Woodpeckers that Michael Charest had seen over the weekend. We again met Marcus there, this time with Bryan Hansen and Wayne Sladek. We quickly found a BBWO which flew by and then landedand drummed steadily. It appeared to be a female, but we didn’t learn until later that females of this species do drum. Other than fabulous vistas the stop was otherwise notable for a Sooty Grouse that called steadily near the end of the road, and when I turned my back fluched giving Bruse a quick look in flight.

We decided to make a quick parking lot stop at Sunrise parking lot stop, but changed our minds when the line at the entry gate was really long, so instead went to Lake Tipsoo for a walk around the lake, and to get our FOY Mountain Chickadee. The Chickadee was found easlly, but nothing else new, so we had lunch at a beautiful Hwy 410 pullout and called it a day.