Rare bird sighting in Oregon: Amateur photographer captures stunning images
A rare bird sighting on the Oregon Coast has bird watchers aflutter.
The sighting was made by Vancouver resident and amateur photographer Michael Sanchez during a visit to Hug Point Falls.
The wayside is five miles south of Cannon Beach and includes forested picnic areas, a restroom and trails that lead to a seasonal waterfall and the beach.
Sanchez, a band director at Skyridge Middle School east of Vancouver, is also a musician and voiceover artist who took up photography a few months ago. He went to the Oregon Coast in April to photograph landscapes and work on his photo skills.
“I was just out near Cannon Beach looking for waterfalls to photograph,” Sanchez said.
“When I was done photographing the falls, I turned around and saw this cute little bird on the beach,” he said.
He used the opportunity to play with the settings on his Sony mirrorless camera with a Tamron 18-300mm f3.5-6.3 lens and managed to capture several images before the bird flew away.
When he returned home and looked at his pictures on a computer he was surprised to see that it was much more colorful than he thought.
Curious to learn more, he posted his images on social media in hopes of identifying the bird. He soon learned to his surprise that the “little black bird” was a blue rock thrush (Monticola solitarius) and it was a very long way from home.
The blue rock thrush is common throughout southern Europe, northwest Africa, Central Asia, northern China and Malaysia. But it had only been seen in North America one other time, a sighting in British Columbia in 1997 that was ultimately dismissed by the record committee in Canada.
As word spread about the unusual sighting, Sanchez was soon flooded with messages from birders wanting to know more about the encounter.
“I never knew this little bird was going to give me my 15 minutes of fame,” Sanchez said with a laugh.
One of the people who reached out was Nolan Clements, a PhD student in the Wildlife Science Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Clements is a member of the Oregon Birding Association and sits on the Oregon Bird Records Committee. The committee verifies all rare sightings before posting them to an official list.
Adding a rare bird to their own “list” is a major goal for avid birders. The morning after learning of the sighting, Clements was on his way to Hug Point in hopes of seeing the bird with his own eyes.
Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found.
“Had it been found again, there would have been thousands who would have come for that bird,” Clements said. “People have been known to take red-eyes from the East Coast to Portland for stuff like that. For some people, it turns into a lifestyle.”
But why has this particular bird turned up in the Pacific Northwest?
“That is a tough question,” Clements said. “Seeing a pattern of songbirds from northeastern Asia, from Russia, Siberia, wondering to the Pacific Northwest is not an unprecedented thing,” he said.
Experts speculate that birds may hopscotch from island to island across the Bering Strait, fly across the Pacific Ocean or catch rides on cargo ships. Although unlikely, the bird could have escaped from a cage locally. Clements discounted that theory because the bird, while common where it is found, is not typically kept as a pet.
Interestingly, Clements learned of another sighting of a blue rock thrush made in the Farallon Islands off the coast of California a few days after the Hug Point report. Whether it is the same bird or a second one may never be known.
Regardless, the whole episode has been a fun experience for Sanchez.
“We have a beautiful world,” he said. “This was just one little encounter with that beauty that I feel very fortunate to have had.”
Contact photographer Chris Pietsch at chris.pietsch@registerguard.com, or follow him on Twitter @ChrisPietsch and Instagram @chrispietsch.
This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: Stunning photos capture rare bird sighting on Oregon Coast
