Protecting Fauna and Habitat

By Doug Ewing, Pilchuck Audubon Society I live near the Snohomish River in Snohomish County. More than 10 years ago, I began a daily habit to pick up litter along my river. I began to notice lost fishing weights in the shallow water. These range in size from tiny, spherical, “split-shot” weights that crimp onto the angler’s line to disk and pyramidal weights of 1 to 10 oz. each. All...

By Kathleen Snyder I am happy to report that we have a second nesting by Western Bluebirds at the Center for Natural Land Management nursery near Tenino.  The first nesting produced 4 or 5 babies.  This second one has 3 or 4 babies.  As you can tell, it can be hard to differentiate how many individuals there are in a pile of feathers!  Our other boxes were used by Tree Swallows...

Kathleen Snyder Spring this year has been challenging – wet and cold.  This seems to have delayed nesting behavior in our migratory birds.  As a result our project has had mixed results.  We have thirteen boxes at the Center for Natural Land Management main nursery and four at their annex nursery.  As of the middle of May, we have one nest box with eggs and incubating Western Bluebirds. ...

By Kathleen Snyder Things are coming together just in time; March and the arrival of Western Bluebirds are just around the corner.  Beautiful new nest boxes constructed by Rinehold Groepler, Kayleigh Kueffner, and Fred Bergdolt have been installed in Violet Prairie under the leadership of Mary McCallum.  The Center of Natural Land Management (CNLM) is deeply involved in prairie restoration in the South...

By Jennifer DeSelle-Milam During the 2017-2018 school year, the Olympia School District unknowingly created the perfect habitat for killdeer at Pioneer Elementary School. Our new mini-building was under construction, and the rain and heavy equipment made a muddy mess of our school grounds. The district brought in loads of gravel to remedy this problem, and it didn’t take long for the Killdeer to move...

American Oystercatchers and Short-billed Dowitchers – photo Andrea Westmoreland, Wikimedia By Kim Adelson Walking along the coast in Western Washington – along estuaries or on the beach – you can potentially spot about 70-80 species of birds. (This does not count birds you might see from shore, but who are really in nearby habitat such as in trees behind the beach, rarities, or birds you would...

(by Bob Wadsworth) On a densely foggy morning, January 13, Hank Henry and I joined the Olympia Harbor Patrol on a trip from Swantown Marina to Boston Harbor where we met Craig Merkel to do the annual cleaning of the purple martin nest boxes. (Harbor Patrol Captain Darlene flanked by crew members Janet Notarianni and Dave Palazzi) On the way we soon discovered that our binoculars were useless as the...

As most of you know by now, six major avenues to making your yard (or other space) more bird friendly are to provide food, water, shelter, plus protection from toxins, from predators, and from window strikes. Water is perhaps the most important and beneficial of these needs, and one of the least costly, but one often overlooked here in the northwest; we always seem to have an abundance of water, so...

Click on pic to link to Audubon site. As most of you know, the National Audubon Society considers climate change to be the number-one threat to birds; its scientists predict that global warming could result in the extinction or dramatic range-restriction of nearly half of North American birds by 2080. As birds in Western Washington face this danger, we are at risk of losing more than 40 species, such...