I've yet to see it appear in print, but prepare yourself for a new component of the city of Federal Way's tourism campaign: Bird watching.

Please control the temptation to chuckle and allow me to explain.

The city, like many other communities in Western Washington, plans to squeeze its own quart of milk out of the eco-tourism cash cow.

I don't think the tourism board expects to see hordes of Gore-Tex-clad birders pointing their Swarovski's at the starlings gathered at the cement-fortresed wetlands behind the Commons.

If that's the image that came to mind after my first paragraph, then you probably fall in the majority of Federal Way residents who have no idea how many flourishing natural areas we have in our rapidly growing community.

The city will have a hard sell to convince the local bird watching elite to visit Federal Way, but not because they don't have a quality product for that market.

Our parks, preserves and natural areas simply don't carry the clout or beg for visitors like other bird watching hotspots found north and south of Federal Way.

But they certainly deserve a little attention.

As Scott Anthony's column alludes to this week, most people who explore the outdoors in Federal Way have a handful of secret, under-utilized, and quite often unmarked nature escapes inside the city limits.

Any of you who have visited the West Hylebos Wetlands Park off 348th Street already know one of mine.

At least three times a week, while my editor thinks I'm following a hot news story, I host an impromptu staff meeting at the Hylebos with the park's abundant wildlife. They always arrive on time and don't pressure me about deadlines, so we get along really well.

Most visitors never make it past the parking lot or boardwalk trail, and the small white sign along 4th Place South doesn't exactly pull people in off the highway.

While the buzz of passing commercial airliners and I-5 traffic still resonate their soundtrack of suburbia, it's not hard to convince myself that I'm the only human around for miles.

Solitude sells in Western Washington, and it grows scarcer by the minute. And if the city can convince Puget Sound bird watchers they'll spot rare and beautiful winged species without excessive intrusion of the two-legged kind, they're bound to generate some local revenue.

As a dedicated shooter for this newspaper and an aspiring avian and wildlife photographer in my spare time, I've spent countless hours behind the lens and behind the wheel in pursuit of bird watching on the west side.

On many weekends, I travel south to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge to log several miles of trail and a few more entries in my birding book.

Much like Federal Way, Nisqually sees a return of dozens of species of migratory songbirds and waterfowl. Just on a larger scale.

When the snowy owls or white-faced ibis or yellow-rumped warblers decide to spend a few weeks at the refuge, a visitor might find it difficult to locate a place to park.

Last weekend at Nisqually, while wrapping up a day-long hike around the dike trail, my partner Bobbi and I spotted a wood duck drake (male) in an algae-filled slough along the trail. The colorful bird spotted us instantly and quickly disappeared into the vegetation along the bank.

A pair of bird watchers soon appeared on the trail behind us and asked us what we had seen. Another couple stopped, and then another. Word soon spread of the finding and the poor little duck quickly formed an unsolicited fan club.

Good grief, it's just a wood duck, I remember thinking, not the ivory-billed woodpecker.

The whole scene reminded me of Yellowstone, where it's easy to spot the wildlife by looking for the crowds of visitors stopped alongside the road.

The wood duck bailed under the pressure, and so did I.

After work on Monday, I stopped by the Hylebos to see what new migrating species had arrived that week.

Tree swallows, just back from a long winter in Argentina, fluttered over Marlake pond, dive-bombing the surface of the murky water for hatching mayflies. The bellowing call of a green-backed heron (although I haven't spotted him yet this season) echoed in the trees. Moments later his mate answered from across the park.

A red-winged blackbird, after signaling that I had approached too closely to his cattail, nearly flew into my chest in his feverous, springtime display of mating machismo. I was alone, as I often am at the Hylebos, and luckily no one witnessed my embarrassing reaction to our encounter.

It's certainly not suitable to print.

But there across the pond, no more than 20 feet away, five wood duck drakes, along with three hens, sat on a partially submerged log, napping in the warm springtime sun.

I approached slowly and shot a few photographs from a reasonably close distance, then I turned around and left them to their daydreams.

Everything seemed perfect. The sun, the budding trees, the singing birds. No fan clubs, no crowds; just the wood ducks and me, alone, in Federal Way.

The city shouldn't have any trouble selling that experience.