Correction: Birders gather on Lake Forest Park street, hoping to see rare Asian bird

Birders in Lake Forest Park photo by David Walton

An Asian bird called the Red-Flanked Bluetail showed up in Nancy Morrison's Sheridan Heights backyard on March 17, 2022. 

Nancy said, "As the finder of the bird, I was completely unaware of what it was, and how rare it was. I only knew that I could not identify it, so I sent the photo along to a birding group. They identified it for me. So, thanks go to the Tweeters listserv run through the University of Washington. It was their members who identified the bird for me."

Someone there apparently alerted other birding sites, including the ABA Rare Bird Alert website.

Red flanked bluetail in Lake Forest Park
photo by Nancy Morrison from ABA website

By Saturday there was a good sized group of birders, standing in the rain, hoping to add this bird to their lifetime list.

The bird is about the size of a starling.

In 2017 a gull from the Galapagos Islands turned up in Richmond Beach (see previous article). That incident brought birders from all over the northwest.