Chance (sometimes) favors the prepared birder, or WTH was that?

What a great time of year to be out with a pair of binoculars! What ever drove me to come inside to this stupid computer...well, more on that in a moment.

Migration is in full swing and the activity level out there is frenetic. It seems that every bird is either trying to gather more food for the journey northward, or organize a nest and corner a mate for a short stay here. And it's a great time to be on the lookout for rarities, if that's your MO.

I was driving home to Twisp on Tuesday, following the Methow River home. Just upstream from the townlet of Methow, I glanced down the embankment into the river. The river may already be down from its high mark, a discouraging thought, but there is still a lot of water coming down the valley.

What I saw at 55 mph was a pair of Canadian Geese (those are the ones that go "honk, eh") bobbing in the water against the far bank, and a pair of birds in the middle of the river that looked exactly like...Long-billed Curlews? Marbled Godwits? Bristle-thighed Curlews?

To the relief of most of my passengers, I rarely turn around for birds. This time I got turned around (twice) and off the road just in time to see the Canada Geese shoot the rapids, and no sign of the mystery shorebirds. At 55 mph you catch so few details, and your mind tries hard to fill in the blanks. They were big--at least the size of small ducks, but more slender. Their plumage was mottled or "marbled," heads small and necks long in proportion to body size. Any details of the bills were lost against the dark water.

Occam's razor suggests the most parsimonious explanation. Nothing more than a pair of female Mallards, or at best Green-winged Teal, glimpsed too quickly to capture anything but a tangle of field marks and then elevated in my mind to a rarity. Now I just need to get over it and move on.

This morning I took a quick trip to the Beaver Pond at Sun Mountain. I had my binoculars, but I had ulterior motives, hoping our spring rains had encouraged some tasty fungi to emerge. No such luck. But it was a glorious morning and I got good looks at Ring-necked Ducks and Hooded Mergansers on the pond. There seemed to be an abundance of Red-naped Sapsuckers, and a few Orange-crowned Warblers moving through. Nothing unusual, at least till I got back to the truck.

I had parked on the flat above the pond where the Corral Trail crosses the road, hoping to put myself into Blue/Dusky Grouse terrain. I heard one, a single distant hoot of derision at my expectations. I parked facing up valley, and was admiring the view of snowy Mt. Gardner when a large bird launched off the ridge and took to the air. I figured it was one of the Ospreys that perennially nest at the pond. In my binoculars the long neck of the bird and rounded wings dismissed the idea of the Osprey, and I tried hard to turn the bird into a Great Blue Heron, another likely pond denizen.

A long time ago I spent two years chasing Sandhill Cranes until I convinced Utah State University to give me a Master's Degree so I could stop harassing the birds and get on with my life. Failing to turn the bird over the Beaver Pond into anything else, I finally had to acknowledge it was a Sandhill Crane. It disappeared below the tree line and settled on the far side of the pond.

Cranes are rare in the Methow. A respectable migration of the birds passes just to the east of us, heading up the Okanogan River to Canada and Alaska. But they rarely stray westward. We have some decent breeding habitat for cranes, and it would be wonderful if this one had a mate and decided to stay. The parsimonious approach suggests otherwise, while a birder can always hang on to hope.