Summer bird check-in

We’ve made it to August, somehow, so I figured now was a good time to do a check in on the birds here at the house and around the region. Summer is the slow time for birding — everyone is settled in to their place so there’s no migration going on, and by July, nesting is finishing up and the chicks are out and about. Late July showed the first sign of migration, and those are the shorebirds, but there’s not a lot going on right now. What I’ve been doing the last few weeks is trying (and failing) to chase some rarities. One very unusual summer visitor here in Kitsap has been an Arctic tern, which moved in in July and has been hanging out, on and off, at one spot on Bainbridge Island. I’ve gone after it five times so far, and missed it every time — it tends to be a morning sighting, and later in the day it heads elsewhere, and is sometimes seen in the evening as well — all depending on low tides exposing some mud flats where it hangs out with a group of Caspian terns. Best I’ve done so…