This morning I stopped off at the storage area where the park's brochures are kept to do an inventory and was greeted with a call as I unlocked the warehouse door. While it seemed familiar, it wasn't anything that I'd heard recently, I played it back in my mind while the door opened and I walked back to my truck to grab my binoculars. Hearing another "round" of the call, I remembered the mnemonic:

"Quick, three beers!"

"Quick three beers!"

"Okay, it's a flycatcher", I decided.

Then it hit me:

"Yes! That's it! An Olive-sided Flycatcher!"

I never did find the bird up in the pines, but recognizable calls count. However, despite the persistent request, I haven't had a beer in many years, and it has been a really long time since I had one at 8 in the morning . . .

That was the second new species for the week after what seemed like a bit of a dry spell for new "year birds". The first was on Tuesday while I was lounging around trying to recover from my nasty cold: a female Red Crossbill stopped by my birdbath that afternoon. Earlier in the day, before the wind started to kick up, and while feeling much better thanthe day before, I did shoot a few wildflowers. At this elevation this early in the year there aren't but a few, one early bloomer is the Common Starlily (Leucocrinum montanum). I think it may be a good year for wildflowers based upon some of the stuff I see growing in the vicinity of my trailer. Very little flowering yet, but, as last week showed, winter hasn't quite given way to spring completely.

This photo is also from Tuesday morning, an Acmon Blue that I encountered while searching for flowers. A tiny butterfly whose total wingspan is an inch or less, it is the first butterfly I've photographed since arriving here more than a year ago. I guess I really need to work on that statistic a bit more. . .