On a beautiful mid-September day Nathanael Swecker led a trip of 11 to explore and learn to navigate part of his JBLM e-Bird patch. Nathanael burst on the Pierce County birding scene last year with several posts a week from various areas of JBLM, often finding birds the rest of us only dreamed about finding. He has immersed himself in birding in the 3+ years since he became an avid birder, and has decided to undertake studying and documenting on e-Bird the JBLM avifauna.
We began our day meeting at the Roy “Y” park-and-ride, where 10 ABC birders joined Nathanael where he showed us excellent topographic maps of the JBLM area, complete with range map borders, and outlined our plan for birding today. Here is a copy of the Range brochure with a simple map. In order to bird it is first necessary to obtain a free range pass from the base Range Control Office. Then you need to check with the range control website or phone number to see what ranges are open.

Our first stop was at the Spanaway Marsh, although not in the usual way for most of us. Most birders access the marsh from the turn-around at the south end of 176th Street where it crosses Pacific Ave. Nathanael explained that this area is a joint JBLM/County road, and sometimes he has encountered police who don’t want him to park there, or access the area from there. Instead we circled around to the back of Training area 9, via a right-hand turn just past the railroad tracks near the usual entrance to Chambers Lake. We turned there, then another right onto Transmission Line Road, and entered the back of the marsh area. We got great access to large areas of the marsh water that are not visible from the 176th St. entrance, and saw Wood Ducks, swallows, and a good variety of fall passerines.

Next we visited Chambers Lake, taking a nice walk down the back side of the lake accessed by taking a left off the main road past the dam bridge, going a ways, parking and walking on the road nearest to the lake. It gives much nicer water views that the front side, and we saw upwards of 80 wood ducks, a flock of 8 Blue-winged teal, several other waterfowl, Red-breasted sapsuckers, and experiences an area many of us had not seen from that perspective.

Our last stop was the Area 15 part of the 13th Division Prairie. Many of us learned that the 13th Division Prairie encompasses much of 3 training areas, and the access is often limited to only area 15, sometimes area 13 and essentially never area 14. Area 14 is the big open prairie area where environmental concerns limit access. There we found bluebirds, a Peregrine falcon, both Sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, and again found ways to visit the Muck Creek riparial corridor from a vantage new to most of us.

Many thanks to Nathanael for teaching us about how to bird his “patch” on JBLM, and we look forward to his promised website on birding JBLM in the near future.

Here are e-bird links to our lists for the day when we totaled 58 species.

Spanaway Marsh

Chamber’s Lake

JBLM Training Area 15

Good Birding.
Ed Pullen