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.

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!

And here’s what the new, sixth edition of the National Geographic Field Guide has to say:

…intense searching subsequently [after the April 2005 announcement] has yet to produce more documentation, [a circumstance] seemingly not possible in an age when most rarities discovered are photographed and those images are posted on the Internet the same day…. sightings that lack provable evidence more likely represent wishful thinking.

The seventh edition will see that fine bird relegated to the appendix shared by Eskimo Curlew, Bachman’s Warbler, and Labrador Duck.

Oh, to have been born 150 years earlier! No, never mind.

The snow and cold finally brought a few Purple Finches in to our Hamilton feeders, at least one adult male and two brown birds; anybody care to age and sex the one above?

This has been one of my favorite birds for more than 30 years now (yikes), one of the first species Alan introduced me to when I “became a birder.”

Here’s a somewhat more revealing view of the Chipping Sparrow frequenting our feeders the last couple of days. In my original photo of the partial bird, the bird’s small size (easily deduced by anyone who’s ever held a handful of black oil sunflower seed!) and long, narrow tail pretty much narrowed it down to Spizella. The rich, deep brown of the upperparts should have ruled out Field, Clay-colored, and Brewer’s Sparrows, and the whitish flank and pink toes eliminate American Tree Sparrow.

I actually had to play this quiz myself: the only view I’d had of the bird was its hindquarters on the camera’s display, and had to wait some time to confirm my identification of the image. My identification was confident, on the basis of the features I’ve just described, but it’s well to remember that certainty never precludes error! So we’ve been glad to have the bird linger on the porch, eating its fill of sunflower seeds and chasing the American Goldfinches from their perches.

As those blue skies suggest, it was a good day for raptors, and we were delighted to see a juvenile Golden Eagle and a Merlin, neither of them terribly common in central New York.

Passerines included the first Field Sparrow I’d seen in some time, and a good half a hundred Cedar Waxwings.

We looked in vain for the big gray ones (they should be arriving soon), but the scrutiny we devoted to the birds did turn up something at least as interesting: two members of the flock had deep reddish-orange tail tips, the tell-tale sign of an appetite for introduced honeysuckle.

And then, our walk over, the weather changed. First it was rain, then cold, and then, late yesterday morning, the drops changed to flakes, and we had our first snow of the season. Ten inches of it overnight!

And to think I could be in Tucson…. As the temperature rose this morning, it began to melt, adorning houses and mailboxes and even bird feeders with icicles, a phenomenon I’d nearly forgot about after these years in the southwest.

Happily, the snow hasn’t deterred the users of those feeders, and activity was high as we watched over breakfast.

My favorites are the White-breasted Nuthatches, a mountain canyon specialty in southeast Arizona but a charmingly confiding glutton here in the east.

With that broad black cap, short bill, pale back, and white flank, there’s no mistaking this for “one of ours” from Arizona; this is Carolina Nuthatch all the way–should the taxonomic split ever come, that is.

The snow has also brought in a few Tufted Titmice, a species we don’t see much of in this open grassy lawn that passes for a yard.

There’s something about that buzzy whine as they approach the feeders that says “winter in the east”–though I first got to know this bird at its northwestern extreme in the Midwest.

And now a quiz: what is this fine bird coming to the feeders today?

This flock also contained a single female Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, dwarfed by the pair of Pileated Woodpeckers feeding noisily in the dead trees overhead.

All these landbirds were a pleasant surprise. The lake, too, had a few birds on it, most abundant and most conspicuous among them half a thousand Bonaparte’s Gulls.

Ring-billed Gulls were common, too, and there were a few American Herring Gulls about; but I was most excited to see small gangs of Great Black-backed Gulls loafing on the sandbars.

Somehow I hadn’t expected to see them, common as they are nowadays everywhere between the coast and the Great Lakes.

Waterfowl were still scarce, with the exception of a nice raft of 200 Common Mergansers. I’m sure that will change in the next weeks as cold and ice creep down from the north!

But I was there to see one species, Common Redpoll.

On Sunday I’d been so surprised by April redpolls that I hadn’t even tried to take any pictures, but yesterday I interrupted my admiration of this last of the winter’s lingerer to snap a distant photo or two. This is a romantic species for me, bound up in memory with the deep snows and cold winds of a childhood now 30 years past; to find them on a bright day in mid-April was startling, and to watch this one yesterday as it fed with American Goldfinches, Downy Woodpeckers, Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, and Song and American Tree Sparrows was like stepping back into my early days of birding in the midwest.

But for each of these local specialties, there are sparrows whose fascination is based in just the opposite, in their vast distribution over most of the continent. Song Sparrow and Dark-eyed Junco, for example, are among the commonest and most widespread birds in the Nearctic, ranging from Alaska to Florida, from California to Quebec.

But they aren’t the same everywhere.

This Song Sparrow is on territory here in Madison County, New York, singing the day away on the edge of Woodman Pond. He’s unmistakably an eastern bird, with those heavy chocolate markings–as unlike our pale reddish birds in southeast Arizona as you can imagine.

The juncos here, too, are distinctly eastern in appearance: dark and fairly uniform in coloration, the males deep slate, the females (like this one) with just a tinge of brown on the back.

This individual is a regular and greedy visitor to Alison’s millet pile; interestingly, the bird shows a single white wingbar on the left, formed by the tips of the greater coverts, while on the right wing, shown here, those spots either have worn away or were never present.

A stressful time of year for small rodents, I imagine.