While I was down at Juanita Bay one weekend, a killdeer was hanging out on a muddy flat near me. It was busy extracting worms from the mud to snack on. The worms were not totally onboard with this plan and they were doing their best to stay in the mud. Some times the killdeer won the struggle and sometimes the worm did!
While I was shooting super bikes at Shelton, I was wandering along the fence line out on the circuit when a lot of bird noise started up. Regular readers may recall my previous post about a killdeer in Bellevue that was making a lot of noise. This was a pair of killdeer and they should probably reconsider their tactics.
I was totally unaware of them until I got close at which point they started making a hell of a racket. The reason was that they had a couple of chicks with them that were hiding in the longer grass trying to stay out of sight until their parents encouraged them to move. The adults would make a lot of noise and would fan out their wings and turn their butts in my direction. Clearly they didn’t think too much of me.
Once they started making this display, I looked around until I could see the youngsters. I would never have seen them otherwise as they were well concealed even though they were out in the open. I had no desire to make them any more stressed than they already were so I moved along to leave them in peace. They did try to move away from my approach which meant going where I was going but I was soon passed them and they could go back to avoiding the motorbikes.
Nancy and I were at Meydenbauer Park in Bellevue when we saw this Killdeer. A crow was hopping about nearby and it seemed to be causing the killdeer some concern. We wondered whether the crow was going to harm it in some way when we suddenly realized that the killdeer was far from defenseless. It suddenly went on the attack and charged the crow which freaked out and took off. There was I worried about this bird and it was totally in control.
