Rick Wright – Page 145 – Birding New Jersey

July 27, 2007June 23, 2018

AOU Check-list: 48th Supplement

It’s here, it’s here, the newest Supplement to the AOU Check-list. No great earth-shattering surprises this time, but a few changes of note to us amateurs.

First, the Bean Geese have been split; the species that has occurred in the 48 contiguous US states is Anser fabalis, the Taiga Bean-Goose (hyphen copyright 2007, AOU Committee on Classification and Nomenclature). I was fortunate enough to be half of the CBC team that discovered Nebraska’s first occurrence of this species in 1984, and was proud (I hope not prideful) to see that exciting record cited in the Supplement.

Yellow-legged Gull Larus michahellis has been split from Larus cachinnans, Caspian Gull; the only records for Yellow-legged Gull sensu novo accepted in the Supplement are from Quebec, Newfoundland, Maryland, and DC.

I was startled to read that Sacred Ibis “seems to be on the way to establishment” in Florida after individuals escaped from zoos after Hurricane Andrew. If poor Florida continues on this path, it will be more like escaping into a zoo.

The really big news, though, for those of us who like to collect odd facts for those cocktail parties I seem never to get invited to (wonder why) is the repositioning of the New World vultures. Remember how much fun it was to point out to new birders that “vultures are really storks”? Well, it turns out that vultures are really vultures, and the family Cathartidae has been returned to the order Falconiformes, though with one of those ominous asterisks indicating “uncertainty as to exact placement.”

My sentiments exactly.

June 29, 2007August 21, 2015

Bulgaria 2007: A Black Sea Clifftop

The little seaside village of Sinemorets was a relaxing base for a couple of mid-trip days. Red-backed Shrikes and Hawfinches were easily watched in the gardens, and a Little Owl frequented the balconies of one of the newer hotels. But the real attraction was a brushy pasture atop a steep cliff, five minutes’ walk from town.

As everywhere in the Bulgarian countryside, Eurasian Skylarks sang with blithe spirits in the tall grass.

Less common were Tawny Pipits, which Frank and I had a great time watching early one morning before breakfast. This was a species I’d seen only once before, in southern France, and it was great to have leisurely looks at this handsome bird.

They have a beautiful flight song of ascending “zing” notes, and this species would become a characteristic sight and sound as we moved north along the Black Sea.

The biggest prize, though, was a gang of four Rosy Starlings, which I stumbled across on a pre-supper walk. These turned out to be the only birds of that species for the entire trip, as wonderfully improbable in their pinkness as I had always expected them to be.

April 7, 2007December 19, 2021

New Mexico Shorebirds, and Birds of the Shore

It’s a long drive from Roswell to Tucson, but the excitement of having watched the chickens dance got us through. Besides that, there was much to see along the way, and we would probably still be in New Mexico had we taken every promising road and looked for every species that occurredÂ to us as we drove along (“Hm, wonder if there are Boreal Owls in there….”).

My favorite of the brief stops we made on the drive west was the alkali flat at Holloman refuge, just east of Alamogordo. I’ll have to check my notes, but it seems to me that that was the very spot where Ted showed me my first Snowy Plovers years and years ago; and they were there yesterday, too, or at least their descendants, five pairs or more out on the shimmering expanse.

A dozen Western Sandpipers were out in the middle, looking hot and bothered, and a surprise Baird’s Sandpiper was a good find, too; this far west, Baird’s are much commoner in the fall (which, for Arctic-nesting shorebirds, starts in about 3 months).

Technically not a shorebird, this little guy was on the shore of a wetland near Roswell; Burrowing Owls don’t need the water, but the disturbance associated with steep banks is of obvious advantage to them.

March 9, 2007July 5, 2018

Disco Potoo

February 22: It started to rain as we returned to Chimino for our lunch, but we were too full of the morning’s excitement to care. Fortunately, the weather cleared just as we were loading our things onto the boat for the return trip to Sayaxche, where our van once again awaited us, and the ride back on the Pasin was as birdful as the ride out had been.

Birding time knows only its own clocks, of course, and so darkness fell well before we were in Tikal that evening. But night time in the tropics has its own allures, and at one point two great saucers of yellow light flashed across the road in front of the van. A bird! We screeched to a stop and looked out the windows to find a Northern Potoo perched on a stump just feet away from our vehicle.

Our security escort, a few car lengths behind us, had obviously not seen the bird, and a second later they were pulled up beside us, frantically asking what was wrong, what had happened, what we were doing. Beside us, that is to say, blocking the bird. Our answers were even more frantic, and when we were finally able to make them understand what we were seeing, they generously offered to put a light on the potoo for us.

Regrettably, the only illumination they found to cast on the scene was the blue-and-reds on the roof of their SUV, so for precious seconds we saw the bird in the strobe flashes of police lights. At least the siren didn’t come on, though if it had, at least I wouldn’t have been able to hear someone, unnamed, humming an ABBA tune from the back seat.

February 13, 2007December 19, 2021

Longspurs 3, Owls 2

It was a perfect prairie homecoming today. Gary, Chris, Mark, and Molly discovered a Lapland Longspur yesterday on the Sonoita grasslands near Elgin, and there was no way I couldn’t look for that bird, a species with fewer than 20 records ever for southeast Arizona.

So Darlene and I bumped across the pastures on a dramatically windy afternoon, finding the described site and, a pleasant surprise indeed, Erika and Marjorie hunkered down in the lee of a stock tank. A couple of hundred Horned Larks were feeding among the cowpies, and goodly numbers of Chestnut-collared Longspurs joined them, their musical little chirrups chiming each time the flock shifted position.

Most of the Chestnut-collareds were females or drab males, but a few were showing the black of breeding dress concealed beneath their pale feather edges.

I was particularly excited to find at least 4 McCown’s Longspurs in the flock, a bird I know well from its breeding grounds in northwest Nebraska but one I have rarely seen in winter; it was outstanding to see them with the Chestnut-collareds and to firm up my shaky impressions of their face pattern and bill shape.

Marjorie and Erika had been holding down the fort long enough to be cold in the biting wind, so they headed out. Darlene and I continued scoping the flock, and 45 minutes later a dazzlingly bright male Lapland Longspur appeared. He fed among the grasses and the cowpatties for a good 20 minutes, apparently unaware of how intensely he was being admired. Gary has posted beautiful photos of the bird at azfo.org, but I was reduced to a miserably poor effort at digiscoping; still, the bird is identifiable as it peeks over the cowflop in the glare of a shakily held camera.

Well, maybe ‘identifiable’ was an exaggeration, but he’s in there!

So what to do after that wonderful experience? The clouds and the light over the mountains drew us over to the San Rafael grasslands for dusk. Northern Harriers were gathering to roost, and the last Mourning Doves and Lilian’s Meadowlarks were on the roadsides. It started to rain, then to snow, but like ornithological mailmen, we were undeterred. As we drove the dirt roads slowly in the gloaming, we flushed first one, then another, then a total of at least four Short-eared Owls.Â Our last bird of the dayÂ was a Burrowing Owl, standing on the road in front of the car, bobbing slightly on its stilt-like legs before it too lost itself in the tall grass.