Category: Information

The time “between the years” was our chance to visit the North Carolina coast, four hours from our temporary site here in Carrboro.

We stayed on the edge of Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, and took advantage of the latter municipality’s canine-friendly beach regulations to tire Quetzal out at the beginning and end of each day.

Between the doggie’s needs and the windy weather, we did less birding than we’d anticipated, but still visited a great many of what we were told were the best localities.

One surprise—it probably shouldn’t have been—was the number of lesser black-backed gulls on the outer beaches. Indeed, on our first walk at Kitty Hawk, the first flock of two dozen larids we saw was no less than fifty percent lesser black-backeds, a source of real astonishment just a few decades ago.

We also did some exploring farther inland. Mattamuskeet, windy and cold and with the sun in the wrong place of an afternoon, was a lot of fun all the same, and here we saw our first North Carolina anhingas.

There’s a real delight in forgetting, or not knowing, to expect so fantastic a bird on a trip and finding it nonetheless.

The swans were a similarly fine surprise. I knew we’d see some, but I’m quite certain that we saw by at least one order of magnitude more than my lifetime total up to that point: the tundra swan is a species I’ve seen regularly and in numbers only in southern New Jersey, with ones and twos and tiny flocks in the midwest and the northwest over the years. Here, this past week, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, on lakes and sounds and often at amazingly close range.

A nice end to the Old Year.

Every birder has at least a dim idea of the importance of “market hunting” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Canvasbacks, bobolinks, Eskimo curlews: there wasn’t much that didn’t appear on the restaurant boards in the right season.

But it wasn’t just gourmands and their suppliers roaming the aisles. Collectors, too, museum men and private hobbyists alike, made the big urban game markets a regular stop on their rounds in search of rare specimens, and the early ornithological journals reported on their finds.

In January 1885, for example, Boston purveyors offered a notable plenty of northern hawk owls, though pine grosbeaks and snow buntings were markedly scarce. Ptarmigan, shipped in from Labrador, were going for a dollar and a half or two dollars a pair, an attractive price for dealers in naturalia: “From the way several prominent taxidermists are prospecting in the vicinity, we are led to believe that more than one eye is on a future corner in the market.”

From even farther afield, sharp-tailed grouse were “nearly as plentiful” in the stalls as prairie chickens, and “several barrels of blue grouse”—whether duskies or sooties I cannot say—arrived in December. Unfortunately, most of the grouse had had their heads removed for shipping, a disappointment to the collectors, one of whom—”F[rancis] B[each] W[hite]” of Boston—found consolation where he might: at least, he wrote, “the flesh was white, juicy and tender, in our opinion far superior to that of the common [presumably the ruffed] Grouse.”

As one of the best-known bird painters of the twentieth century, Allan Brooks is a familiar name to most birders. Before his art was more widely recognized, Brooks devoted much of his time and owed much of his income to securing and preparing Canadian birds and mammals for collectors in the US and England. Summer of 1901 found him far to the northwest of his Okanagan Landing home, working in the Cariboo. From a base at 158-Mile House, Brooks made collecting excursions throughout the Horsefly area, including to nearby Carpenter Mountain.

Tennessee warblers arrived there May 22 of that year, and by June 15, “a good many” singing males were present in the area. That day, while Brooks “suffered torments from the mosquitoes,” he followed a female to her nest, whence he “put her off and shot her … as she fluttered off.” Over the next week, he found several more nests, some with eggs and some with nestlings; it is unclear whether he collected the little chicks, but he did take the nests with eggs, which “contained small embryos.” (Auk, January 1902) By 1905, one set, shown in the photo above (Oologist, September 1905), entered the cabinets of J. Parker Norris, Jr., in Philadelphia, joining “an unparalleled long series of wood warbler eggs [that] alone occupied more than an entire large cabinet” (Kiff, “History of the WFVZ,” 2000).

As Kiff tells us, fully half of that enormous oological collection, including most of the North American eggs, passed after Norris’s death into the hands of Nelson Hoy. Over a long life, this Pennsylvania collector amassed some 15,030 sets of eggs (Kiff, “Bird Egg Collections,” Auk 1979), making it the largest such collection privately held in North America.

I do not know whether that collection, which absorbed many others in the twilight period of American oology, was accessible to researchers during Hoy’s lifetime, but he “entertained scout groups and school groups on an almost daily basis” in his private museum in suburban Philadelphia. A year after Hoy’s death in 1979, the nests and eggs—which “more than filled a 42-foot trailer truck“—were moved to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, where they remain today.

For decades now, Bloomfield has found itself stranded in the spandrels created by formal Christmas Bird Count circles. But our area was covered in some of the earliest years of the event.

1903:

And twice in 1904:

This year, as in several of the past years, we’ll be counting at Mill Creek Marsh, in Secaucus. Let me know if you’d like to join us this coming Sunday morning.

Now that everyone has arrived, the main event started up officially this evening with a welcome and a pleasant dinner together here at Birds Eye View. But we early arrivals took full advantage of the day, starting with an early morning walk that took us a good eighth of a mile out the entrance road—the birding was too good for us to cover any more distance.

The highlights were many, including great views of white-fronted and yellow-headed parrots, that latter a seasonal visitor to the immediate area that waits for the cashews to fruit each spring. We also enjoyed a female green-breasted mango feeding young at a nest, rose-throated becards at startlingly close range, nice views of a bat falcon and lineated woodpeckers. . . .

You get the idea.

Entertainment over breakfast was provided by palm and yellow-throated warblers and a ringed kingfisher perched just outside the dining room. It was growing warm by then, but I set out on the nearby Limpkin Trail, a short path through wet woods with ten parulid species, unusually visible spot-breasted wrens, a russet-naped wood rail, barred antshrike, and on and on. With so many birds, I figured I had walked a great distance over those two and a half hours, but when I turned around so as not to miss lunch at the lodge, I found that I was no more than a briskish five minutes out.

The heat and humidity were sensible after lunch, but still bearable. More warblers in the little campground included a northern parula, and Kathy and Robert appeared just as my first lifer of the visit did, a splendid little Yucatan woodpecker. Two different groups of soaring birds continued to provide excitement: black vultures formed and re-formed flocks of up to 80 birds at a time, and gray-breasted martins made us laugh every time as they plunged into the water to bathe and then shook themselves in the air like so many flighted dogs. Always something to enjoy!

And tomorrow should be even finer. We’ll start with another quick walk, then breakfast, then out on the boats to see what we may see.