Towheeblog

I was watching a kettle of five Turkey Vultures circling over the South Yamhill River in McMinnville’s Joe Dancer Park this morning…suddenly a black bullet dropped out of the sky and shot across the lawns of the soccer fields, my first Barn Swallow of the year…this bird’s co-geners will be above those fields regularly until mid-September when their exuberant flight will take them south.

Mid-afternoon I was walking through a suburban neighborhood here in McMinnville: starlings, Brewer’s Blackbirds, a flock of crows pass overhead, a male Anna’s holding ground…then I heard what I took to be a White-crowned Sparrow song.  I looked around: large parking full of new Toyotas, small garden with scrawny saplings and scattered flower beds, clipped lawns, an empty street, large elder care facility…no real habitat.  I shrugged it off and went on, later I passed the same spot, there sat my songster atop one of the saplings.  Maybe he was just passing through and felt like singing about the lack of rain for the moment.  We’ve had over three inches already this month, more than all of March.