More Superb Owls

In honor of the Superb Owl Sunday holiday, here are some more Superb Owls.

Great Horned Owl

Long-Eared Owl

Long-Eared Owl. Seriously, how cool are these?

Northern Saw-Whet Owl. ohsocute!

Northern Saw-Whet Owl. How round!

Long-Eared Owl. I mean, they're feathered super-villians.

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.

Christmas Count

It's that time of year again--Christmas Count season! The 116th running of the Central Park Christmas Count went off on Sunday December 20th, in unseasonably warm weather. It was fun but, a bit slow. As always, a large group of people met at the south pumphouse of the Reservoir and divided into seven teams--covering the Northeast, Northwest, Reservoir, Great Lawn, Ramble, Southeast, and Southwest areas of the Park--and, accompanied by Urban Park Rangers, attempted to count every single bird in Central Park.

It was a little slow. The Park totals were 4264 individual birds representing 55 species. That's a little sparse--two years ago in terrible sloppy weather, for example, we had 62 species and 5414 individuals--and some types of birds, like native sparrows, had very low numbers. On the other hand , there were three late warblers--Wilson's, Black-and-White, and Orange-Crowned.

The best bird in the Park, for me, was the Orange-Crowned Warbler at the top of this post. It was found by the Great lawn group during the count, next to the "Three Bears" playground at 79th and Fifth Avenue. After the collation meeting, I went to look for it, and found a number of birders watching it some small distance away, along the 79th Street Transverse just south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, foraging with a couple of Ruby-Crowned Kinglets.

It was a very active little bird, hard to get my camera on, though it gave some excellent (though brief) views. The photo above is the best one I got, but if you want to see what a better and more patient photographer was able to get, you should check out this photo at Jean Shum's website. You should scroll around for other great views as well.

This year, I was in the Ramble group. It was really too large a group, over 20 people, and a big chunk of the Ramble is currently fenced off for maintenance of the paths (which doesn't seem to me actually happening, but that's another matter). Our best bird was the Great-Horned Owl who's been hanging around for almost two months now.

Near the owl's roost, the bird feeders were quite active. Here's a Chickadee coming in for a landing next to a House Finch.

So, that wraps up my posting for 2015. I hope to update this a little more regularly next year.

Rarity season

In November, after the bulk of migration is over, the rarities start to show up. Some are lost birds, blown off course or young and inexperienced at migrating. Some are northern birds on the move for winter food sources. Some are young birds of sedentary species, dispersing in search of their own territory.

A Great Horned Owl showed up in Central Park on Sunday (11/1). I didn't know about it until after sunset--I had gone up to Inwood Hill Park, which was quiet, though I did see one nice bird:

This Vesper Sparrow was fairly confiding, foraging on the soccer field south of Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and occasionally retreating to a small fenced-off area of tall grasses. Anyway, I went home afterwards and took a nap, and woke to find owl reports on my Twitter stream.

The last Great Horned Owl in Central Park was in April of 2012, and only stayed one day. So I thought I was out of luck. But to my surprise, there was a Twitter report early Monday morning that the owl was still there. It was sleepy and turned away from observers, so it wasn't a great look even though it was not hidden at all, high in a huge sweetgum tree. Then I had to go out of town on business for three days, but on Friday, the owl was still there! and awake in the morning.

It moved around a bit--at one point it leaned forward as if interested in flying out at something. Or more likely it was just pooping.

Another excellent bird in the park is a Red-Headed Woodpecker. It's a first-year bird, so its head hasn't turned red yet.

It's been there for a couple of weeks now, and looks like it's settling in for the winter. The bird has been excavating a roost hole in a snag, and caching acorns in locust trees. I hadn't known that Red-headed Woodpeckers stored acorns.

This weekend, strong winds from the west blew in some very interesting birds--Franklin's Gulls and Cave Swallows--but I haven't had any luck in spotting any.

I can't resist showing off one more owl photo.