Towheeblog

When a new or interesting bird appears I try to get a photo as soon as I can, even, or especially, of I don’t know what it is. On June 12th our Malheur Field Station birding trip went up Devine Canyon north of Burns.  We quickly began to find birds that are often hard to find down in the basin.  As Lewis’s Woodpeckers were fly catching far over our heads, above the lip of the nearly vertical canyon walls, I got a few hurried shots.  Look closely at this image, the top two are Lewis’s…but lower down is a bird with pale head and tail and dark wings…that is a Clark’s Nutcracker which most of our group didn’t get a good look at and which I did not notice when I was shooting:So we had a Lewis and a Clark…the only two birds named for the intrepid explorers who came to Oregon before it was Oregon and spent the 1804-5 winter at Fort Clatsop not far from today’s Astoria.  Both birds were discovered for science by that expedition.  The nutcracker was originally called a “crow.”  The only known bird skin specimen from that expedition is of a Lewis’s Woodpecker, now in the collection at Harvard though it had to be re-patriated from England by a wealthy donor.