As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  I’m going to write about 12,500 words a day from Friday Jan 17th through Monday Jan 20th.  You can set more modest goals and only participate a few of those days if you please.  Fiction or non-fiction is fine.  Post in the comments or elsewhere with links in the comments, or be shy / inviso and just mention your word count when you get to resting points.  I’ll read yours if you read mine; critique can be as baby-gloved as you please.  Holler in the comments if you want to join.

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In honor of folksy affable war criminals, welcome to a post on known unknowns.  Not the most known unknown, as Triple Six Mafia once called themselves.  The birds I’ve seen but haven’t ID’d.  Not the ones I don’t care about, like figuring out which flavor of samey seagull I just saw, but ones that have gotten my goat.  My goat can get got.

Of course, there are the white birds in tight formation streaking along 320th in Federal Way WA just east of I-5, that I’ve mentioned in posts and comments.  Still no idea who they are, tho leaning toward a fairly small gull species.  But I won’t bore you with that one today.  Instead…

That Thrush Tho.  Swainson’s?  Hermit?  One time at West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way the trees were filled with these drab nothing-ass thrushes.  I remember them being more grey, like hermit thrushes, but swainson’s are much more commonly seen, and it’s less cringe to assume you saw the more common of the possible IDs.  Strangely, there were dozens on one trip, and zero any other time I’ve been.  Passing through, maybe.

The Swarm.  Where I used to work in Auburn, one random day the sky over a particular field was full of birds, behaving very weirdly.  I’ve never seen anything exactly like it before or since, and I couldn’t ID them.  I assume they were some form of North American blackbird, probably brewer’s, which I’ve seen at a walmart parking lot not far from there.  But they were all centered over this one field about five hundred feet per side, ignoring all the adjacent fields and parking lots they could have used, flying forty to seventy feet up, just zooming around each other yelling, nonstop.  Mating season?  Hellifino.

The Cormorants.  When I lived in Seattle near the Ballard Bridge, I’d take the bus up and down Nickerson Street, where in the winter I could see dozens of black cormorants perched in a bare tree next to the water.  They looked like vultures; real cool.  But were they brandt’s or pelagic?  Binches are basically identical except some tiny details in the eyes or whatever.

Again, if you’re a Washington bird person familiar with those neighborhoods who has experience with the same beasts to narrow it down for me, holler.  Otherwise, the sheistiness continues.

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