The Birdy Site eBird Challenge!

If you live in the Northeastern United States, you are getting ready to face a humongo blizzard sometime tonight or tomorrow. In the state of New York, where I live, the governor has even banned all road travel from 11pm tonight onwards.

In other words, most of us are not going be going out birding tomorrow.

Instead, we will be stuck inside. What will we do?

I have a proposal. It is The Birdy Site eBird Challenge for the Northeast US Blizzard, January 2015. Your challenge: submit one complete eBird checklist a day each day you are stranded at home.

What do I mean by complete? Well, when you submit an eBird checklist, there will be a question on the last page that will look like this:

Put in all the birds you were able to identify, and then click yes. That is a complete checklist. 

Tell me in the comments two things: one, how many species you eBirded from your home over the blizzard and two, how many eBird checklists you submitted. Good luck! And whatever you do, have fun.

My eBird yard life list

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New York State Waterfowl Count

January 19th, 2015, was cold and windy.

Unfortunately, it was also the day that I was set to do the NYS Winter Waterfowl Count. Organized by NYSOA, the count gets a general idea of what waterfowl are wintering in New York State.

I had been asked to help cover the North Shore of Nassau County, and had signed up to do the east side of Hempstead Harbor, a small inlet of the Long Island Sound. My goal was to cover from Roslyn to Glen Cove, a total of 7.6 miles.

The first stop was at the Roslyn Duck Ponds, two small ponds at the base of the harbor. Two merganser species, the Common and the Hooded, were present among the fifty Mallard, four Mute Swan, one Ruddy Duck and two American Coot. Otherwise, there was pretty much nothing hanging around (other than the ubiquitous Ring-billed and Herring Gulls), as the ponds were mostly frozen over.

Hooded Mergansers

Common Merganser

Next up was, interestingly enough, a senior center. Behind this senior center is a trail that runs along the water, offering great views of the harbor. Here there were ninety American Black Duck, four Great Blue Heron, and of course numerous Ring-billed and Herring Gulls. 

As I took a brief break from scanning the water, something black caught my eye. I got my binoculars on what looked to be a crow, but it was gliding, flying like a hawk. And then it turned.

The bird had a wedge-shaped tail.

COMMON RAVEN is by no means a common bird in my area, yet that is what this bird was. I relocated it at the next stop Cedarmere Preserve, and it flew right over my head and called. While it is an uncommon species, ravens have nested in the area in the past, so it was not totally unexpected. 

Common Raven. Terrible shot, I know.

Nothing else was at Cedarmere, so I headed up the road to Tappen Beach, my old wintertime patch, and found two Greater Scaup, a loon sp.,  and a pair of Bufflehead. Further up the beach were six Common Goldeneye, plus more American Black Ducks and Bufflehead.

Next up was Sea Cliff Beach, the site of the 2013 Black Guillemot. I found no guillemots, but I did see a Common Loon putting on quite a show, and eight Red-breasted Mergansers, giving me all the North American merganser species for the day.

Common Loon

The final stop of the day was Morgan Memorial Park, or rather the jetty there. However, by this time, it was so cold and so windy that any sort of optics were useless; indeed, it was virtually impossible to stand upright. The only good bird I picked up there before being blown back to the car and home was a Horned Grebe, just before the light darkened too much to see any further species. I hope to participate in this survey again in the future, though hopefully in better weather.

             

Great Blue Heron

ABA Bird of the Year

Every year in January, the American Birding Association announces it's Bird of the Year. The Bird of the Year is a big deal as it represents the ABA for the year, not to mention being stuck on the optics of every ABA member around (the ABA sends out stickers with an illustration of the bird to all members).

Last year's ABA Bird of the Year stickers (this year's haven't arrived yet)

This year, the artist chosen to paint the ABA Bird of the Year was Rafael Galvez. He announced the species in a short video in English (below) and in Spanish. Take a look.

             

Also, the ABA has a badge that you can embed in your website with Mr. Galvez's beautiful artwork. Just click on it below and it will take you to a site where you can copy the HTML code and paste it to your own site.

Snowy Owl: Nemesis No More!

As many of you readers know, in the winter of 2013-14, there was a massive irruption of Snowy Owls. However, try as I might, I did not get to see one; therefore, the Snowy Owl went on my nemesis bird list.

However, the winter of 2014-15 had arrived, and I had high hopes of getting the bird this year. Of course, finding decent numbers of Snowies was harder without an irruption. Nonetheless, I had been alerted to a Snowy present on New Year's Day.  On January second, I rushed out there to see it.

Before getting to the spot, I made a stop at Floyd Bennett Field, an old airport that was being well trafficked by birders due to a Cassin's Kingbird that had shown up there in November 2014. It was the second state record of this western flycatcher in New York State and seemingly the entire New York birding community had run down to see it.

I found the Community Gardens, where the bird had been hanging around, by asking directions from a very rude park ranger. (Actually, my parents did the asking, since I would have been to scared to approach this guy.) I hopped out of the car at the gardens and asked some other birders if it was still around. They said yes. I walked over, put up my binoculars in the direction some photographers were shooting, and saw it.

Cassin's Kingbird!

Having seen the second state record of Cassin's Kingbird, I headed down to a beach on Floyd Bennett Field. There, Brant, Canada Geese and of course the ubiquitous Herring and Ring-billed Gulls hung around near shore, but further out sixty Red-breasted Mergansers bobbed in the waves. One Song Sparrow in the parking lot seemed content to eat out of a dish left out for a feral cat, even though the cat was right there. A Bufflehead kept out to the water.

I headed back to the community gardens to look for Horned Larks, but first had to count the guys with giant lenses waiting for the kingbird. While they and their equipment searched the garden, the kingbird flew right in front of my car, causing my parents to exclaim loudly. It then sat obligingly in a tree ten feet from my window, allowing for great photos.

It was now time for my nemesis, the Snowy Owl. I headed to the place where the owls were reported to be and there met a kind ranger who informed me of the location of the owl--right behind a post on the beach.

Upon arriving at the beach, I realized that maybe finding this bird wasn't going to be as easy as finding a post and then looking behind it. There were at least twenty posts up and down the beach. So I just started checking every post.

The eight or ninth post had a lump behind it.

I have seen lots of pictures of these arctic owls, but seeing a SNOWY OWL in person is very different. The bird swiveled his head back and forth, looking around with calm but alert eyes. I moved back, in case I was scaring him, and he hopped up on top of the post, then flew a short distance and sat on the sand and preened. Some birders who said they were from Canada happened along and we all enjoyed views of the beautiful owl; the bird that was a Nemesis No More.





To avoid stressing the owl, we left soon. On the way home, I made a brief stop at Fort Tilden, a beach along the Rockaway Peninsula. Two Red-throated Loons bobbed in the waves there, another Red-breasted Merganser hung out by the shore, and a Long-tailed Duck dove under every few minutes. Other than that, nothing really happened, but there was a beautiful sunset to look at and I had fun photographing the waves as they pounded against the jetties along the shoreline. The last bird of the day was a Double-crested Cormorant flying north against the setting sun.