Stepping into Spring with a spring in your step, or something like that

in spring a young hawk's fancy...

Spring is here! And resident birds are at various stages of family life. Some of the lcal Red-Tailed Hawks were already sitting on eggs by the beginning of April. Others, like the pair above that I ran across one morning in the Ramble, were just getting started on the process.

Great Horned Owls, not big on nest concealment this year

Some birds were even farther along. The Great Horned Owls at the NY Botanical Garden in the Bronx nested in a very prominent place this year and had nestlings by mid-March, who should be about ready to fledge by now

not just one but two adorable slaughterfloofs!

Once the slaughterfloofs are ready to leave the nest, they will flutter down into nearby trees. The parents will feed them there until they can actually fly. The Botanical Garden folks are prepares to rope off the whole area while that's going on.

Jay chillin'

Other residents, like this Blue Jay, will be breeding a bit later in the Spring and are just chilling for now. I've only just started seeing Robins building nests this week, though they've been singing for a month or more.

"Rusty Blackbird" always sounds to me like a baseball player's name from the 1930s

Many birds who spent the winter in the NYC area will be moving north to nest. Rusty Blackbirds were at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx all winter as usual, and are now headingfor their mysterious breeding grounds in somewhere in the boreal forests.

American Wigeon, swim away from me

Our wintering ducks will also be nesting somewhere in the north. THis female American Wigeon spent a good deal of the later winter at Harlem Meer.

male Golden-Crowned Kinglets have the orangey racing stripe on their head

Meanwhile the first spring migrants have started moving through the area. Both kinds of Kinglets have been around, along with Chipping Sparrows. Fox sparrows have basically all left already, and the bulk of Song Sparrows have passed through, though some will stay and nest here.

very confiding Chipping Sparrow behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Phoebes came in in a big rush around the end of March and have also mostly left by now. Still waiting to see the first Pewees and Empidonax flycatchers.

Phoebe, here today gone tomorrow

The first warblers have arrived--Pine, Palm, Yellow-Rumped, and now Black-and-White--but I don't have good photos yet. Also there have been several reports of Yellow-Throated Warblers, which is unusual.

Return of the son of the revenge of more Fall migration photos

Winter Wren working it for the camera

The thing about Fall migration is that it lasts a long time. Spring migration is a few intense weeks in May, with a slow build up for maybe a month. before, and a rather abrupt ending. Fall migration starts around the end of July and continues in a fairly steady stream for about three months.

So the less common birds get spread out a bit. Sort of.

lazy afternoon

This Whipoorwill turned up in the Loch in northern Central Park in late September. That's a nice bird for Manhattan; we get maybe one a year--more frequent than then Chuck-Will's-Widow, less frequent than Common Nighthawk.

Whipoorwills sleep most of the day, like owls, and wake up around dusk to hunt insects. They're hard to spot, since they don't move around much during daylight, and they generally roost pretty high up. This one was in an unusually low perch, the the photographers had a great time with him.

That same day, a Grasshopper Sparrow was spotted on the Knoll, also in the northern part of the Park just a short walk from the Whipoorwill's roost. I didn't see that bird, though. Well, maybe I did: I saw a very streaky backed sparrow fly by me that the other birders said was the Grasshopper. They had had a good look at it before, but for me, that wasn't enough of a view to count.

showing the flag

Then the next week, two fairly uncommon birds showed up at Harlem Meer. This female Green-Winged Teal spent a lot of time browsing a patch of duckweed in the southwest corner of the Meer near the little island.

The Green-Winged Teal is our smallest duck. Here's what that means:

size comparison

You see it's about half the size of the Mallard. You can almost ID it just on size.

Also on the Meer at the same time was a female American Wigeon. I had a heck of a time picking it out of the crowd of Gadwalls, even though they were all just a few feet off shore. It blended in surprisingly well.

semi-anonymous

The dark bill isn't all that striking when you're watching it swim around, and the coloring is a bit cryptic. Eventually I noticed that it was the only one never showing a white speculum, and then it became obvious.

bird of the evening

Besides the Grasshopper sparrow, Central Park has hosted a couple of other uncommon sparrows. A Vesper Sparrow spent the better part of a week in the area called Locust Grove, along a woodchip path just west of the Great Lawn between the Delacorte Theater and the Pinetum. It only liked to come out when the light was dim.

Of course, a lot of non-rarities continue to move through, like the Winter Wren at the top of this post, and this very confiding Pine Warbler:

warbler at my feet

He hopped around within a few feet of me, too busy foraging to worry about some slow monkey.

But there are signs the migration is ending, like the arrival of Juncos. They usually come right at the end.

sign of the end times

Wigeon landing

Tuesday I was at the Reservoir. An American Wigeon was sleeping peacefully on teh east side with some Black Ducks. I waited for some time. My patience was eventually rewarded when the Wigeon woke up and flew a short distance to join a group of Shovelers.



The Red-Necked Grebe was still present on the west side, steadily coming into breeding plumage and fishing actively and successfully.



I'm not sure how it managed to swallow this big fish.

American Wigeon and Red-Necked Grebe on the Central Park Reservoir

The ice on the Reservoir is finally, slowly, melting. The area of open water around the fountain now reaches east to the dike and nearly to the southern edge; the whole dike (which runs down the center of the reservoir) is now open water, from the south pumphouse to the north pumphouse.

As the water opens up, new birds begin arriving. A Red-Necked Grebe has been sighted intermittently for several days; an Iceland Gull was spotted yesterday; Red-Breasted Mergansers have been around. The usual late-winter grew of Shovelers, Buffleheads, Hooded Mergansers, Wood Ducks, American Black Ducks, and an occasional Ruddy Duck is present.

Today, rain was promised but only late in the afternoon, so I went around 2 PM to see what was around. Nothing out of the ordinary that I could see on the south edge; no Red-Necked Grebe and none of the gulls looked exotic. I watched a Ruddy Duck diving for a long time. After yesterdays long hike I found I lacked the energy to walk to the north part of the Reservoir; there was less open water there anyway.

Scanning the farther reaches of the open water, I saw a small bird diving repeatedly. Couldn't quite make it out. Ruddy? Pied-Billed Grebe? I watched a while. About 3:30, it was being harassed by gulls, and lifted off into a crazy twisting flight, dodging in and out of the air traffic and coming down square in the middle of a group of Buffleheads, who greeted her as one of their own, which indeed she was.

I thought about leaving, but I noticed that a lot of birds were arriving from the north. I decided to walk back to the south pumphouse and see if anything turned up. From about 50 yards off, I saw a duck frantically preening himself in the narrow strip of open water over the dike near the pumphouse. It had a shockingly white head. When I got closer, I realized it was an American Wigeon.



That's a pretty nice bird for Central Park (and a life bird for me, and my 75th species in New York County this year). After getting some photos, I sent an email to the NYS-Birds mailing list and a tweet to the #birdcp hashtag (and if anyone reading this knows who runs the @BirdCentralPark account that retweets that hashtag, can you ask them why they ignore my reports?) and went back to watching. He was a very itchy bird.

Eventually a few birders showed up and saw the Wigeon. I went back to the larger patch of open water, but nothing new had shown up. Eventually, about 4:30 or so, with the sky looking more threatening and the rain overdue, I decide to leave and headed back toward the pumphouse.

Just then, a birder whose name I unfortunately do not know came from that direction and said the red-Necked Grebe was present; he and David Barrett had been watching it swimming down the dike corridor. And there it was.



This was a far better view than I had at Randall's Island last month, and I watched and photographed as the rain began to come down. I didn't care about the rain.