Puget Sound Habitats

The place where a bird is normally found is termed its “habitat.”

The Puget Sound Region has eleven major habitat categories.

· Open salt water.
This habitat includes all the salt waters of Puget Sound and adjoining inlets, bays, and straits including the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia. Open salt water is host to loons, grebes, cormorants, scaups, scoters, goldeneyes, gulls, terns, and alcids. Purple Martins nest locally in a few saltwater bays. There are many vantage points to scan saltwater habitats including Discovery Park, Point Defiance Park, Semiahmoo Spit, Dosewallips State Park, Point Wilson, Point No Point, and John Wayne Marina.

· Rocky shore.
The rocky shore habitat includes cobbled beaches, breakwaters, and rocky outcroppings along the saltwater shoreline. Alki Point, Ediz Hook, Deception Pass, and Penn Cove attract a selection of birds that prefer this habitat, including cormorants, Black Oystercatcher, turnstones, and Surfbird, while Harlequin Ducks tend to feed in the waters off these shores.

· Sandy shore, mud flats, and salt marsh.
The extensive mudflats of the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, the Stanwood area, and Kennedy Creek offer feeding habitat for migrating and wintering shorebirds, while Padilla Bay’s mudflats provide food for large numbers of wintering waterfowl. Sandy shores often host numbers of shorebirds and gulls. Salt marshes may host Great Blue Heron, Virginia Rail, ducks, and shorebirds.

· Fresh water, marsh, and shore.
Lake Washington, Lake Sammamish, and American Lake are just some of the many freshwater areas that abound in the Puget Sound Region. Great Blue Heron, Bald Eagle, Osprey, and Belted Kingfisher obtain fish from these waters, and waterbirds such as grebes, geese, ducks, and coots may be found there. American Bittern, Green Heron, and Virginia Rail skulk in marsh vegetation. Cattails often support nesting Marsh Wrens and Red-winged Blackbirds. Swallows catch insects over the water, while songbirds such as Yellow Warbler frequent the trees and bushes along the water’s edges, foraging for food.

· Wet coniferous forest.
This habitat includes coniferous forests at low and middle elevations, dominated by Douglas fir, western hemlock, and western redcedar. These woods are home to Band-tailed Pigeon, a few owls, Hairy Woodpecker, Hammond’s Flycatcher, Steller’s Jay, Chestnut backed Chickadee, Winter Wren, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Varied Thrush, Western Tanager, Yellow rumped Warbler, and Pine Siskin. At higher elevations, forests of silver fir, mountain hemlock, and subalpine fir host Blue Grouse, Gray Jay, Hermit Thrush, and Townsend’s Warbler.

· Broadleaf forest.
This habitat includes stands of red alder, black cottonwood, bigleaf and vine maple, and madrone. Extensive broadleaf woodlands line the riparian zone along many creeks and larger streams throughout the Puget Sound Region – as in the Skagit, Dungeness, Snoqualmie, and Stillaguamish River valleys. Broadleaf trees often grow in mixed stands with conifers as well as in uniform stands after the logging of coniferous forests. The birds that prefer this habitat include Ruffed Grouse, Western Screech- and Barred Owls, Red breasted Sapsucker, Downy Woodpecker, Western Wood Pewee, Pacific-slope Flycatcher, Hutton’s, Warbling, and Red-eyed Vireos, Black-capped Chickadee, and Black-throated Gray and Wilson’s Warblers.

· Oak prairie.
This small, threatened lowland habitat occurs in some of the driest parts of the Puget Sound Region, such as the San Juan Islands in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains. It is characterized by native grasslands and scattered stands of garry oak. The most extensive remaining examples are the South Sound Prairies that dot the fast-draining, gravelly soils extending from Fort Lewis west to Tenino and Littlerock. Birds to be found in such places include California Quail, Common Nighthawk, House Wren, Western Bluebird, Chipping Sparrow, and Western Meadowlark.

· Subalpine parkland and meadows.
This high-elevation, open habitat of the Cascades and Olympics consists of meadows with alpine wildflowers and scattered stands of trees. Look here for White-tailed Ptarmigan, Horned Lark, Mountain Bluebird, American Pipit, and Gray crowned Rosy-Finch. Paradise and Sunrise at Mount Rainier National Park, Hurricane Ridge and Deer Park in Olympic National Park, Mount Baker, and the North Cascades Highway offer good access to this habitat.

· Shrubby thickets.
Shrubby thickets exist in clearings and around the edges of coniferous and broadleaf woods, transportation and power-line corridors, and overgrown fencerows. Willow Flycatcher, Bushtit, Bewick’s Wren, Orange crowned and MacGillivray’s Warblers, Spotted Towhee, and sparrows live in this habitat.

· Parks and gardens.
This urban and suburban habitat attracts many of the birds that come to our backyard bird feeders, including hummingbirds, woodpeckers, chickadees, Red breasted Nuthatch, grosbeaks, Purple and House Finches, and American Goldfinch. This habitat also hosts Rock Dove, American Crow, American Robin, European Starling, and House Sparrow.

· Farmland and pastures.
The open pastures and agricultural fields of the lowlands host Northern Harrier, Ring-necked Pheasant, Mourning Dove, Short-eared Owl, and many wintering geese, swans, ducks, hawks, eagles, falcons, gulls, starlings, and blackbirds. Prime examples of farmlands include the Snoqualmie Valley and the Skagit, Samish, and Lummi Flats.

To learn more about Puget Sound habitats, order the book,
Birds of The Puget Sound Region.