[obol] White-crowned Sparrows breeding in south-central Oregon?

[Joel Geier]

Hi folks,

Seeing Chuck Gates' response to yesterday's digest, I guess he was
referring to the White-crowned Sparrow question from Klamath County (or
did I guess wrong, Chuck?), since this species does show up on Judy
Meredith's list from the trip that Chuck & Judy & Peter Low made to the
Warner Mtns.

I looked through my own breeding-season records from that region (as
archived on www.birdnotes.net) and could only find one that listed
White-crowned Sparrows:

June 15, 2002 Silver Lake Ranger District, Lake County, Oregon
"Birds seen along FR 28 north from Campbell Lake, cutoff to FR 27 and
then cutoff to Antelope Flat."

I have only vague recollections of that trip but this would have been
the area south and west of Thompson Reservoir. I honestly don't remember
seeing White-crowned Sparrows on that trip (I do remember the Lewis's
Woodpeckers) but it looks like I noted the species in birdnotes --
without numbers or comments! -- so it must be true, right?

I do remember running across breeding-season White-crowned Sparrows in
June 2000, while working on the Nevada Breeding Bird Atlas in the
Montana Mountains on the south side of Disaster Peak (just south of the
fabled Oregon Canyon Mountains -- has anyone been back there since Mike
& MerryLynn Denny and Steve Dowlan added to Les Schwab's fortune during
the Oregon Breeding Bird Atlas?). The sparrows were using the shadier
south side of an east-west gulch with mountain mahogany and sagebrush,
just below an aspen stringer. 

The Montana Mountains, by the way, are on my short, short list of "the
nicest birding spots that I've been to once, but have never managed to
get back to since." The Greater Sage-Grouse were so thick as to be a
nuisance. They kept exploding out of cover just as I was trying to pin
down a nesting songbird.

There's a reason why I haven't been back since: Getting there requires
driving south of McDermitt into the Quinn River Valley, then west and
north into the mountains, about 10 miles past the last buckaroo camp. We
(my son Wil, age 7 at the time, joined me for this one) didn't see
another soul the whole time we were up there ... just the corpse of a
helium-filled party balloon that had floated in from who-knows-here and
impaled itself on a barbed-wire fence. 

At one point on the way in, we were straddling a gully in a dirt road
that just kept deepening on one downgrade, until it was close to 6 feet
deep. Luckily it did finally bottom out at a creek crossing, since there
was no way to turn our pickup around, and trying to back up while
straddling that gully would have been even more foolish than continuing.

Our reward was the evening song of dozens of Brewer's Sparrows -- Steve
Dowlan has written eloquently about those -- and many more birds as the
morning sun rose over the high sagebrush steppe.

Happy birding,
Joel

--
Joel Geier
Camp Adair area north of Corvallis
joel.geier at peak.org