Wanderings

I'm going to continue catching up in reporting my early-Spring birding, but first a couple of notes about the state of the Spring migration. It's shaping up to be really strong, at least for variety. Some people have had 20-warbler days in Central Park in late April, which is impressive, and even I have managed double-digits (and 19 warblers before May 1, which is a great total for me). If you have any chance at all to get out, do it--there are a lot of birds to see.

Backtracking a few weeks, I went to various places to spice up the March doldrums. A trip to the NY Botanical Garden wasn't too productive, though it did get e my first Pine Warbler of the year, in addition to the curious Chickadee at the top of this post.

Our friend Barbara took us out to Jamaica Bay NWR for an afternoon, our first time there. There were some nice birds about, like Ospreys and American Oystercatchers, but they were mostly too far away for good photos.

There was a big flock of Boat-Tailed Grackles (part of which was in the tree in the photo above). I hadn't realized they were so well-established in the New York area. I saw one at the NY Botanical Garden a few years ago and it was a startlingly rare sighting.

This female Cowbird was roosting in a tree outside the visitors' center, directly above a nest box, which is bad news for some nesting bird.

On a trip out to Roseland NJ for a business meeting, I took a walk at lunchtime around the industrial park we were in. I heard a lot of birds tooting and peeping nearby. I went around a building and found a culvert and a gathering of Killdeers, feeding and flying about. They were all calling constantly, justifying their Latin name of Charadrius vociferus, which loosely translates as "loudmouthed Plover".

As always, look for birds and you'll find birds.

Return of the Timberdoodles, and other stories

So I've been letting the blog slide lately. Most of that was life getting in the way. Anyway, migrants are starting to come in, and before they become a flood, I'm going to try to catch up with tales of the late winter and early spring.

Late winter is the doldrums--not that much of birdiness in late February and March. In December and January, you have vagrants and too-late migrants showing up and often settling in around feeders or other winter food sources. But the late winter is kind of static--just waiting for the early migrants to show up.

The Killdeer above I found on the northeast shore of Randalls Island at the end of February. It seems to be teh first one seen in New York county this year, and a nice-looking bird. Last year, a pair tried to nest inthe wetlands area on Randall's Island. I wonder if this is one of them.

In a post late last year, I talked about the birds at the plaza of the old International Paper building in midtown. Some of them--two Thrashers, a towhee, a Swamp Sparrow--were still there in mid-January, and at least one was still there in early March.

The thing with unusual overwintering birds is that they tend to stay around whatever food sources they can find until the weather starts warming up around the beginning of March. Then they start moving around, maybe trying to figure out where the heck they're supposed to go in the spring. So if a vagrant or overwintering bird disappears in January or early February, that's a bad sign. For example, the Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker I saw a lot in the Midtown East area in December and January, I last saw around January 18, so it probably died. But birds that make it to the end of February and then disappear, may well be OK. Anyway, I was glad to see that this Thrasher made it.

So by now you're probably wondering why this post is called "return of the Timberdoodles". Well, I'll tell you. Timberdoodles are American Woodcock, a football shaped bird with eyes set well back on its head and more nicknames than you can shake a stick at. Timberdoodle, bogsucker, Night Partridge, Labrador twister, hokumpoke, mudsnipe. They come north very early--late January through March--and have an awful time navigating through cities because they don't see very well straight ahead of themselves. As a result, they often get stuck in small urban parks, so it wasn't a shock when two of them showed up in Bryant Park at the same time.

I'm glad I saw these two there, because I didn't see any in Central Park this winter. Woodcocks like places with a lot of underbrush to hide in, and last year, for example, I saw a dozen of so in the Ramble over the course of the late winter and spring. This winter, the Central Park Conservancy in its wisdom decided to clear out almost all the brush and low shrubs in the Ramble, so no good habitat for the Timberdoodles. Because life wasn't tough enough for them on migration already.

The Conservancy's no-brush idea also means it's probably going to be a rotten spring to see migrants in the Ramble. You heard it here first.

Among the full-time residents, the Cardinals started singing in mid-January, and are still going strong. One interesting thing is that there have been several sightings of leucistic males singing, like the one above. (Leucism is a genetic condition of partial loss of feather pigment; in cardinals it makes a normally bright red male loot a lot like the mostly gray-brown female.) It's startling to see what at first appears to be a female Cardinal start belting out a song.

Things I haven't seen

Almost every time I go out birding, I see things I haven't seen before. Memorial Day weekend was particularly rich.

On Saturday, I went up to Randall's Island for the first time in a couple of months. It wasn't terribly productive, but there was a Killdeer at the salt marsh on the north shore of the island. That's not too unusual, but its behavior was not what I'm used to seeing.

The Kildeers I've seen there are usually transients and quiet; this one was calling constantly, as befits its scientific name (Charadrius vociferus, which is Latin for "loudmouth plover"). The call wasn't the killdeer that given it its common name, but a several long high peeps followed by a descending series of short notes.

And then it flew off the rocks in the saltmarsh to the baseball field, ran several steps, and flung itself in the infield dirt with one wing stretched out.

distraction

A distraction display! I'd never seen one. It must have a nest in the marsh area. I hope that works out OK, but between the starlings, the grackles, and the gulls, I'm a little dubious.

There was also a Laughing Gull, my first of the year, hanging out with some Ring-Billed Gulls on the outfield of another baseball diamond, and giving me a good view.

gull, Laughing and loafing

Sunday was a glorious day to be out in Central Park, but not if you were a starling who got a little too close to this Black-Crowned Night Heron.

nature red in tooth and claw

I've seen herons eat baby birds before, but this was a full-sized adult, and he had a great deal of trouble swallowing it. He eventually got it down, but looked quite saturnine afterward.

Monday I made an excursion to the northern part of Central Park. at the Pool (about 103rd street on the west side), I saw ... um, well. I saw two male Mallards mating.

well, I never!

I see from Teh Google that this is not rare, but I had never seen it before. It was clearly mating behavior, and not fighting, because they did the typical head-bobbing display at each other before one ducked down in the water and the other mounted.

Things were pretty quiet otherwise. Up at the the compost area on The Mount, where sometimes shorebirds stop off to browse in the ditches, there was a family of House Wrens with just-fledged young begging for food.

baby House Wren

Thinking about it, I don't recall ever seeing baby wrens before.

Back downtown in the Ramble, there's a Warbling Vireo nest. It's one of many in the park this year, but it's unusual in being clearly visible from the ground and not too high up. So with luck I'll have several weeks of rare views of Vireos raising their young.

Warbling vireo on nest

The male sings constantly while taking his turn on the nest, by the way. Quite charming. Also, those are spiderwebs all over the outside of the nest--an excellent structural material. Many thanks to Martin Sandler for pointing out the nest. Although it's fairly out in the open, I still would never have spotted it myself.

OPB: Hits and misses

One of the disadvantages of productive employment is that I have less time for birding and wind up chasing birds based on reports I've seen. Other people's Birds, OPB.

Sometimes this works out fine. A bunch of people had seen a Long-tailed Duck at the bridge over the Harlem River at Broadway. So I went up there bright and early on Saturday.

Long-Tailed Duck, what the old-timers still call an Oldsquaw

Very nice-looking drake, hanging out with a female Ring-Necked Duck. On the way home, I went to Central Park. When I got there, I saw a report on-line, only an hour old, of a Scaup on the Reservoir. "Oh, I can do that", I thought. Turned out I couldn't. No Scaup for me. Also no Long-Eared owl, which has been spotted several times in the past few days, originally in the Shakespeare Garden.

That night, I saw reports from Randall's Island, where one observer had seen a bunch of interesting birds--Killdeer, Green-Winged teal, American Wigeon, Common Goldeneye--so that's where I spent Sunday.

pretty close for Common Goldeneyes

The Goldeneye were there, two drakes and a hen, between the south shore and Mill Rock. This was actually the best look I've ever had at them. The drakes were diving, but it was the female who was being harassed by a young Herring Gull. Very strange--normally gulls attack ducks after a dive, when they might be coming up with food. I think maybe this one had a bright idea--"they always come up with food after a dive so if I force one under, I'm perfectly placed to grab it when she comes up." That would be unusually complex reasoning for a gull, even though completely wrong.

Common Goldeneye female, in between annoyances

On the north tip of the island, I failed to find the Wigeon or Teal on the Bronx Kill, but a Killdeer was poking along the mudflats.

Killdeer and American Black Ducks

A pretty good weekend in all. A few more weeks and there'll be some many birds coming in, it will hardly matter when the online reports say. I can do my own hunting.

contented Killdeer

Ha ha! Just kidding. I'll be looking at the reports even more then. Golden-winged Warbler, come on out!

Killdeer, Randall's island

Yesterday, I went up to Randall's Island, mostly to look for the Killdeer that had been reported the day before. The report had been that the bird was on the grass of the baseball fields. Indeed, most of the snow had melted, but the Kildeer was not there. At the saltmarsh on the north end, I saw Song Sparrows and a Swamp Sparrow, and heard three more sparrows I didn't recognize. One gave a long fast trill--like a Junco but faster, and with a sharp up note at the end; it was quite loud, I think the bird may actually have been on the Bronx side of the channel. Another had a monotonous single high fluting tweet, repeated at intervals of a second or two for a minute. The third called do-TWEE-TWEE-do; that was probably just another Song Sparrow. None showed itself in the twenty minutes or so I waited.

The fields were occupied by a large number of Canada Geese and Brant. I walked all around the northeast shore and fields, and finally returned to the saltmarsh area. It was lucky I did so, because it was while observing the marsh from a vantage next to the (closed off) footbridge to the Bronx that I saw movement on the mudflat below.



The Killdeer blended amazingly well with the mud and rocks, and walked quickly over the mudflat. I had a hard time getting a photo, because when I lowered my binoculars and brought up the camera, it disappeared. I did finally get some pictures. As you can see, they weren't great--the bird was at some distance, far enough that I couldn't tell if it ever gave the loud call that gives it both the common name "Killdeer" and the Latin name Charadrius vociferus ("loudmouth plover").

The Killdeer was my 70th sopecies in New York County this year.