Guest Blog: Birding by Agate Lake by Harry Fuller

Written by Harry Fuller on September 25, 2023

Smoky view of the birding site at Agate Lake outside of White City, OR. Photo: Harry Fuller

Yesterday KS Wild sponsored a birding walk at Agate Lake, east of Medford. Smoke and drizzle kept our birding unit small. That lake had little water (less than 20% of capacity), but we had had flocks and flocks of birds. Thirty active, aerobatic Lewis’s woodpeckers in and over the oaks along the eastern lakeshore. 120 loud-mouthed red-winged Blackbirds. A score of lesser goldfinches and three times as many white-crowned sparrows. Over a dozen vultures expecting the sun toi break through haze and wet to produce updrafts fir for soaring. Thirty pipits on the barren, baked lakebed. A handful of killdeer running along the water’s edge. Most numerous: over 200 violet-green swallows dining in the air during a migratory brunch break. The woodpeckers were the most exciting–their loops and dives, their fly-catching, their sudden aerial eruptions and then swoops into invisibility behind leves or oak limb–each move seemingly energized by some devious scheme.

In the image below with TVs on cross bars, note tiny speck in upper left corner–a distant swallow. They were ubiquitous in the air. Thew gang in the willow–all red-wings, singing and calling.

Here’s a California towhee (to go with the quail), a species I never see up north in the Willamette Valley; A favorite, it was the only species that frequented our tiny back garden in the San Francisco years.

  • 29 species:

    Northern Shoveler: 6

    Green-winged Teal: 4

    Ruddy Duck: 1

    California Quail: 10

    Killdeer: 7

    Ring-billed Gull: 1

    Double-crested Cormorant: 1

    Great Blue Heron: 1

    Great Egret: 2

    Turkey Vulture: 14

    Red-tailed Hawk: 2

    Lewis’s Woodpecker: 30

    Acorn Woodpecker: 1

    Northern Flicker: 1

    American Kestrel: 2

    California Scrub-Jay: 1

    Common Raven: 5

    Violet-green Swallow: 250 

    American Pipit: 40

    Lesser Goldfinch: 10

    Chipping Sparrow: 1

    White-crowned Sparrow: 50

    California Towhee: 1

    Western Meadowlark: 6

    Red-winged Blackbird: 120

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