1Any Wednesday, you can embark on a free field trip into the woods, over the Dungeness River and up the Olympic Discovery Trail with one of the sharpest listeners in the West: Bob Boekelheide.
He’s director of the Dungeness River Audubon Center at Railroad Bridge Park near Sequim, and come rain or come shine he guides groups of nature lovers on a two-hour tour of forest life.
And Boekelheide, who totes binoculars and a powerful spotting scope to help people zoom in on their winged quarries, knows how to call them out.
Walking toward the trees just outside the River Center, he emits chirps, buzzes plus a “pish, pish” sound he calls a “predator alarm note” that spurs birds to flit around and become visible.
“They’re curious,” and check to see where the pish is coming from, Boekelheide said during last Wednesday’s walk.
Above him, a whole Douglas fir tree bloomed with minute kinglets, warblers and chickadees.
“You never know what you’re going to see,” on these mornings, said birder Pam Bedford, who’s lived in Sequim for about three decades. She’s been joining the Wednesday walks for about four years now.
Just then, Boekelheide scanned the Dungeness and spied a pair of dippers, charcoal-gray birds that like to pop in and out of the river.
“There’s a singing male,” he said. “That’s two acting like a mated pair — a good sign.”
Next he picked up another small bird’s frequency, even amid the walkers’ conversations.
“Can you hear the black-capped chickadee?” he asked.
At first, Boekelheide seemed to be the only one who caught that creature’s song. But as he and his nine seekers strolled farther along the trestle bridge, it became clear that their 10 pairs of eyes and ears were growing more attuned to the forest show.
Song sparrows — little brown birds with big voices — flew in with spotted towhees, chestnut-backed chickadees, golden-crowned and fox sparrows, nuthatches, one Anna’s hummingbird and one downy woodpecker.
Boekelheide used his scope to show the others an Olympic gull, a sharp-shinned hawk and then a merlin falcon.
When Carolyn Cooper of Sequim asked him where she might find an American kestrel — the favorite species of a friend who’s coming to visit — Boekelheide reeled off a list: on Old Olympic Highway near Kitchen-Dick Road, on Towne Road near the Dungeness Schoolhouse and northeast of Sequim on Schmuck Road.
For Bedford, who’s taken Boekelheide’s “Birding by Ear” course and called it “phenomenal,” the soundtrack of this movie is as much fun as the visuals.
She and her family used to poke fun at “bird watchers,” Bedford said. Now “I’ve become one,” and there’s no turning back.
The coming weeks will be busy, she added. Many bird species will arrive in time for breeding and nesting season.
They range from turkey vultures to violet-green swallows to tiny rufous hummingbirds, and later in spring, one of Bedford’s favorite musicians.
“The Swainson’s thrush,” she said, “has the most beautiful song in the world.”
________
Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
