Off the Map

In the above image, a wandering Blue Jay takes a break a few miles from the Pacific Ocean.

Among birders, it’s understood that unusual visitors are not unusual. Birds sometimes show up where range maps mark them as absent. But not every strange looking bird is a vagrant from some other part of the world.

Below are a few that showed up west of the Cascade Range recently, where they normally never appear.

One of the farthest from home was this juvenile Ruff, a rare visitor from Eurasia. Scores of birders thronged to see this exotic sandpiper, which hung around a local slough for weeks:

Franklin’s Gulls are migrants who usually stick to the interior of the continent. A few showed up on the Pacific coast last fall, attracting a lot of attention:

Hudsonian Godwits are long distance migrants who move from the arctic down through the Great Plains, and then on to their wintering grounds in Argentina. They are rare along the Pacific coast from British Columbia to California.

Here, a pair of these long-billed waders almost blend in with Black-bellied Plovers. That’s one of them with its wings raised:

There’s nothing unusual about seeing a White-breasted Nuthatch in North America. It’s a common bird over a large part of the continent. But west of the Cascades in Washington, it’s a novelty. This one was a few meters from the ocean, in a grove of low pines:

We had a breakout of nuthatches this past season. Pygmy Nuthatches are normally found in the drier pine forests of the interior. But this winter a small flock took up residence in a misty west-side town, also within view of the ocean:

Blue Jays are among North America’s most iconic birds. But they are largely absent from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. So when this one was reported in our area, birders came from all over the state to see it.

I caught up with it peering out from a thicket:

It climbed up for a better view:

Thanks for visiting, and may you be well.