So this morning at Newark’s Weequahic Park I looked. I sorted through the American Coots to see Gadwall and Ring-necked Ducks, and I sorted through the Common Mergansers to see Hooded Merganser and Ruddy Ducks. And I sorted through more than 1,500 Canada Geese in search of anything different.

Difference, fortunately, comes in lots of flavors, especially when it comes to geese. This flock included one “black-cheeked” Canada, a ghostly white leucistic Canada, and the two banded birds above; one sported a very tight orange collar around the neck, inscribed with the yellow characters “F0F0.” I’ve submitted the number to Patuxent; we’ll see what they can come up with.

And then of course the gulls had to be sorted. I almost wish I hadn’t.

Just what this is I’m not sure, but in size, structure, molt timing, wing pattern, tail pattern, and upperparts pattern, the best fit to my skeptical eye was, ack, Thayer’s Gull.

Maybe it’s just a tiny, molt-retarded, pale-winged Herring Gull (like the great hulking bird in front of it), but I’d be surprised.

This is the second individual Thayer’s-like gull I’ve seen this winter in New Jersey. I’ve submitted documentations for both to the NJRBC, and can only hope that the committee’s response is polite.

Winter isn’t very wintry lately here in northern New Jersey. The dog and I spent a couple of hours at the Meadowlands on a warm, windy afternoon yesterday, and it could have been early spring.

With all the water open, Greater Yellowlegs weren’t that much of a surprise, and the Canvasback raft–now up to 235 birds–was pretty much expected, too.

The real surprise, though, was a ticking, tail-wagging Western Palm Warbler in the phragmites. That’s a rugged parulid if ever there was one, but even so, it should have been in Florida palms at this time of year, or at least hanging out in the relatively tropical climes of Cape May with all the other half-hardies.

Full list at eBird.

I’ve made three trips to Barnegat Light this past week, each of them a lot of fun: how can it fail when there are Purple Sandpipers and Common Eiders, and, yesterday, Razorbills to enjoy?

And Harlequin Ducks, of course.

This odd and beautiful little sea duck has been a reliable target for birders at Barnegat Light since at least the mid-1980s, when I first started visiting the   flock there; but something has changed in recent years.

In the 80s and even just a decade ago, fishermen and jetty walkers used to stop and ask me whether I was looking for whales or watching ships. My answer: no, just watching birds. Oh, they’d say, and that was that.

Nowadays, I can hardly get out of the parking lot without having someone ask me whether I’m going out to see the Harlequins. And once I’m out on that treacherous jetty, everyone I meet is eager to point them out, to talk about them, to ask whether they’re in yet.

It’s a great thing, this overwhelming popular consciousness of a rare and inconspicuous bird, but I wonder where it came from. Was there a series of newspaper articles, a special on public television, a poster competition in the public schools? Whatever did it, it’s heartwarming (and a little mysterious) to find non-birders, honest-to-goodness normal people, proud of these fine feathered visitors.

Help me think about this by answering two easy questions:

1. Who was your birding mentor?

2. Who was that person’s birding mentor?

You may need to talk to the answer to the first before you can answer the second. But it will be worth it.

Want to enjoy birding even more? Join me this spring at the Westfield Adult School for a new course. We’ll be meeting two Monday evenings for lecture and discussion, followed by a Saturday morning field trip to try out our new skills.

You can register here. See you in March!

Hurray for all shadowtails everywhere!

Scaled Quail in Willcox, Arizona. Note that the habitat in this photo is lacking what one thinks of as certain critical features: no cars up on blocks, no abandoned washing machines, no steaming meth labs.

Callipepla squamata, to use the mellifluous scientific name, is the type species of its genus; “calli” means beautiful, as in “beautiful writing” or “calligraphy,” and “pepla” is from a Greek word for cloak, as in “beautifully cloaked bird” or “Phainopepla.” “Squamata” is the same as the English adjective “squamate,” of course, “scaled.”

In 1832, Wagler, unaware that the species had already been named by Vigors two years earlier, (re)described it under the epithet strenua, meaning active or bold, as in Horace’s famous oxymoron “strenua inertia.” Coincidentally enough, Wagler’s German name for the genus, “Schuppenhuhn,” takes up Vigors’s original epithet, which together give us the English name of the bird.

More than you wanted to know? Then get up from the computer and go birding!

Long-billed Dowitchers are fairly common in winter in southeast Arizona, where their famous “sewing machine” feeding habits are a familiar sight in the shallows of sewage ponds and playa wetlands.

It’s the females that have those absurdly long bills, but all birds have the characteristic overstuffed shape, as if–in the perfectly apt words of the wondrous Shorebird Guide–they had swallowed grapefruits.

Maybe they have. But it would have to be one citrus stitch at a time.

It turns out to be just as straightforward but infinitely more amusing: a fiscal is a treasury official, assigned oversight of wealth.

Wikipedia offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that Afrikaans fiskaal can refer to a public executioner. That’s plausible and neat, but I have to say I prefer the lectio slightly difficilior by which the fiscal shrikes are bookkeepers of a grisly sort, their currrency bugs and rodents.

A Loggerhead Shrike in Arizona the other day.

Not this one. I wouldn’t want to tangle with a Ladder-backed Woodpecker, and it wasn’t long before this shrike, at Catalina State Park on Monday, took the hint and exercised the better part of valor.