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.

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.

Counting my co-leader Darlene and our sponsor Paul, we were a group of forty-nine, making this one of the three or four largest trips I’d ever led for Tucson Audubon.

The company was great, the birding perhaps a bit subdued, thanks to the chill and cloudy day. The clear avian highlight was, naturally enough, a sparrow, a wintering Red Fox Sparrow that eventually gave everyone ooh-aah views as it fed near the Demonstration Garden with White-crowned Sparrows and Lesser Goldfinches. Any fox sparrow (or should I write fox-sparrow?) is a “good” bird in southern Arizona, and this one started off a nice run of emberizids that lasted the entire weekend.

Friday I spoke at the Wings Over Willcox festival, but I had the morning and Saturday, too, to run around looking for puddles with sparrows in attendance. Brewer’s and Vesper Sparrows were around in heartening numbers, joining the thousands and tens of thousands of Lark Buntings out in the Sulphur Springs Valley.

A single Cassin’s Sparrow was a good find at the Willcox golf course’s leaf dump; that species is rarely detected in Arizona in winter. Less surprising but just as lovely was the Grasshopper Sparrow that joined a flock of Brewer’s Sparrows on the roadside; it’s just visible in the photo second above, but did step out from the crowd a few times to give nice, unobstructed views.

It’s always a delight to be reminded how colorful this bird is with its ochre face and purple collar.

I got back to Tucson too late Saturday to do any birding around town, but Darlene picked me up on Sunday for an excursion to Sweetwater Wetlands.

As it usually does, this urban oasis came through big time with winter rarities: a Chestnut-sided Warbler, a Summer Tanager, a surprising Solitary Sandpiper. There were a few Lawrence’s Goldfinches on the edges of the ponds, where they fed beneath buzzing and chattering Marsh Wrens while hundreds of ducks–including many hundred Northern Shovelers–courted and splashed.

Among all these birds one stood out: a Swamp Sparrow, annual at Sweetwater nowadays but still scarce anywhere in the state. This bird, with streaks still obvious on the upper breast, was probably in its first plumage cycle, putting paid to my old notion that Sweetwater had been hosting just one, long-returning individual.

Rain, welcome rain but cold, chased us out, and it was still spitting when I got up early Monday morning to go to Catalina State Park.

I wandered the washes and saguaro-studded slopes under a Chinese scroll of a sky, the mountains surging in and out of sight as the overcast rolled across their face.

The birding was good; I knew it would be when one of my first sightings was of a Lincoln’s Sparrow, one of two individuals I ran across on my walk. The emberizid flocks were composed mostly of White-crowned and Brewer’s Sparrows, as expected, but there were also four species of towhee mixed in: Abert’s and Canyon Towhees are common there all year, while Spotted and Green-tailed Towhees are only winterers in the park’s lowlands, both species in extremely variable numbers.

As I emerged into the drier desert on the ridges, Black-throated Sparrows became more and more conspicuous, their thin notes issuing from every clump of opuntia.

This abundant and familiar species is something of a nemesis bird for me: with what is fast approaching 40 years of birding under my belt, I’ve still never found this gorgeous sparrow anywhere in the east or midwest, where vagrants seem to show up–for other people–every winter.

Far less given to wandering is my favorite sparrow of all time.

I ran into only two groups of Rufous-winged Sparrows, one probably a pair, the other probably a family. After a moment’s fright, they all let me sit down with them and watch as they went about their quiet business on the ground beneath the catclaw, scratching for seeds and generally being irresistibly beautiful. No song yet from any of them, but it won’t be long. Wish I were there to hear it!

My weekend sparrow list:

Green-tailed Towhee

Spotted Towhee

Canyon Towhee

Abert’s Towhee

Rufous-winged Sparrow

Cassin’s Sparrow

Chipping Sparrow

Brewer’s Sparrow

Vesper Sparrow

Lark Sparrow

Black-throated Sparrow

Lark Bunting

Savannah Sparrow

Grasshopper Sparrow

Fox Sparrow

Song Sparrow

Lincoln’s Sparrow

Swamp Sparrow

White-crowned Sparrow

Dark-eyed Junco

And if you’re a traditionalist, Chestnut-collared Longspur, too.

These fine crows had found a great place to bathe in Vienna’s Stadpark. I felt a bit like one of Susannah’s elders spying on them, but there’s something unusual about these birds: I have no idea what they are.

And neither, in a sense, do they.

Lower Austria’s breeding “black” crow is the handsome gray Hooded Crow, much like this one facing off with a European Red Squirrel in the Schönbrunn gardens last week.

Come winter, though, all identification bets are off. Carrion Crow genes course through the blood of many, perhaps of most, of the thousands of non-Rook, non-Jackdaw Corvus roosting and feeding in the city, producing some handsome combinations of plumages.

Dark birds like this one might pass for a Carrion Crow on casual inspection, but the gray thighs and nape gave it away as a hybrid or intergrade; its exact heritage is likely very complex, full of the crosses and backcrosses typical of these birds in Mitteleuropa.

Many superficially Hooded Crows also showed clear signs of mixed ancestry, with extra black appearing most frequently on the mantle and lesser coverts.

With so many of these Hoodarrion Crows around, the suspicion is unavoidable that even visually “pure” birds aren’t. But–and this is the important point–who cares? We’re stuck enjoying what’s out there, and if it’s crows with fascinatingly muddy bloodlines, so much the better.

They’re no less fractious than their American cousins, of course, but still, a beautiful sight when they’re floating, peaceful for the moment, on a lovely little park pond.

Here’s a good quiz: can you find half a dozen visual differences between the bird in the photo and American Coot? Bet you can.

There’s no doubt that the puzzle bird was a male European Blackbird, one of the commonest birds of many landscapes in western Europe. At the time, I put the description of the bill color down to poor observation. But this latest trip to Vienna made me reconsider.

This male Blackbird, photographed in Vienna’s Donaupark last week, had a bill nearly red–and the orbital ring was just as deep and vivid. Astonishingly, this was just one of at least four such birds I saw over the course of our stay; “normal” birds of this species have yellow bills and orbital rings, and I’d never seen anything this bright before. Interestingly, the tarsi and toes, as readily visible here, were the standard dull gray-horn color, obviously unaffected by whatever factor had resulted in the hyper-pigmentation of the remaining soft parts.

Michael suggested that the culprit might be an immodest consumption of ornamental honeysuckles, but so far as I know, that has been implicated only in plumage variation, and should (shouldn’t it?) have affected the tarsi as well. I thought instead of the bright-billed (and bright-footed) Laughing Gulls one encounters in the eastern US, and recalled, too, the two orange-billed European Starlings hanging out at Sandy Hook this winter.

Who has a real answer?

Join me and Darlene Smyth Thursday, January 12, for a birding sit in the beautiful desert oasis that is Boyce Thompson Arboretum!

Co-sponsored by BTA and Tucson Audubon, this event is free with paid admission ($9) to the park. It’s an ideal chance for casual or beginning birders and birders with limited mobility to see some of the many birds that take advantage of the arboretum’s varied vegetation and inviting water features.

It’s impossible to predict what we’ll see, but BTA has a well-deserved reputation as a rarity magnet. This winter has already seen at least one Rufous-backed Robin, and who knows what else will be waiting for our patient eyes?

Our morning wasn’t exactly a dud, but I can’t say that we were subjected to all that many interruptions of a feathered kind, either, as Alison and I birded Verona and Hilltop Parks.

We did come up with 21 species, none of them rare or otherwise notable to anyone who can’t appreciate a Great Blue Heron standing motionless in the shade, a Red-tailed Hawk being blown overhead like a huge rusty leaf, or a curious White-throated Sparrow emerging, silent for once, from the brush to check us out.

We’ve had lots of good CBCs together now over the years. Wonder where next December will find us birding!