On October 1, my wife and I drove to the Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood to visit the Apple Store.  Upon leaving the store my wife wanted to do some shopping and I decided to wait near one of the main intersections of the mall walkways located outdoors but very surrounded by buildings.  This particular area featured a fountain that, at irregular intervals, briefly ejected streams of water out of three tubes that rose into the air and then fell back on river rocks below.  The fountain feature was round and approximately 10-12 feet in diameter.  There were about four surrounding beds with the usual landscaping-fare plantings… hardly an environment that would attract any interesting birds!

I passed some of my time breaking off small pieces of a dog treat and feeding them to a male Brewer’s blackbird (with only one functional leg) and its mate.  When my wife returned from shopping I pointed out the blackbird and as we stood to leave she spied a small sparrow in one of the flower beds directly behind us.  It was standing rather quietly among some of the plantings no further than 3-4 feet away… in other words, I was virtually towering over it.  She noted it wasn’t the expected House sparrow and I took a closer look.  It was a Lincoln’s sparrow!

I can’t imagine what a Lincoln’s sparrow was doing in that environment.  In fact, until just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have been sure that I could have mounted a successful expedition to find one!  Sibley notes that it is found in “grassy, weedy, and brushy areas, often near water”… which is exactly where I now know to look for the species.  But the only part of that habitat description that applied in this instance was the water of the fountain… which didn’t even include a standing pool of water.  And since the fountain and associated planting beds were at a main intersection within the mall, people, including small active children, were walking all around the sparrow’s little island of refuge.

Last things first…

The birding has been very good lately… in fact, it only slacked off for a week or so in early September.  But things have been so good lately that on September 30 (2014) I logged a new yard bird… a Hutton’s vireo!  At the time I was photographing the bird I was under the impression that I was photographing our first fall Ruby-crowned kinglet.  But in processing the photos I realized that the bird wasn’t a kinglet and in all probability was a Hutton’s vireo… the two birds closely resemble each other.  One of my “better birder” friends confirmed my identification.

In vireo fashion, which I’ve only come to realize this year, this vireo flew to the water and bathed “on the fly”.  I’ve observed this with the White-eyed vireo in Texas in May and the Warbling vireo in our yard earlier this summer.

I was fortunate in being able to get a couple of decent photos before the bird began hitting the water… once it was wet, it became much more difficult to identify.

We continue to have many Yellow-rumped warblers visiting the yard every day… more than I’ve ever seen in the yard previously.  Most appear to be of the Audubon’s race, but many are so pale as to defy my species identification.  (Last spring I was fortunate to be able to get both races in the same photograph!)  I believe that the bird pictured below is a male of the Audubon’s race.

We’re up to about 3-4 Dark-eyed juncos of the Oregon race in the yard.  In most past years the birds have left for higher elevations for their breeding season, but this year we had a pair that remained around the property.  Unfortunately the product of their breeding season was a Brown-headed cowbird, which I think I documented in a previous blog post.  By winter this will be our most numerous yard bird unless the Pine siskins, which I haven’t seen in well over a year, return in previous numbers.  In this photo you can clearly see the outer white tail feathers, a real clue for identifying a junco in flight.

And the final photos are of House finches, usually regular visitors although they did disappear from the yard for several weeks during the breeding season.