Indoor & Outdoor Birding this weekend

Saturday found us doing "gallery birding" with the New Haven Bird Club at the Worcester Art Musuem. Last winter they had contacted Mark because they had heard about his lecture on "Birds in Art" so we travelled down to New Haven for one of their club meetings. Some of the folks were very intersted in coming to WAM to experience the gallery birding Mark talked about, so on Saturday Mark performed his docent role at the museum and led a small but enthused group of gallery birders on a tour. It's always interesting to get people excited about "finding" birds and the Antioch mosaics provide a wealth of opportunity to do this. Including the Purple Swamphen and Ruddy Shelduck along the edges of the KTICIC (pronounced ka tis sis) mosaic.

The highlight of the tour for me were the following two pieces in the Japanese gallery that haven't been up for quite a few years. Just like in real birding, there can be some controversy over bird identification and that's true even in gallery birding. Mark feels the bird depicted on the back of this kimono is likely a phoenix rather than the elaborate chicken (Onagadori) as identified on the label. Sounds like research will be undertaken momentarily!

One of my favorit pieces in the museum's collection is the Japanese crane screen. I hope someday to travel to Japan in winter and see the large gatherings of cranes.

One of the nicest things about birding at the Worcester Art Museum is getting the trip list in advance....not something you get to do all the time with real birding.

After Saturday's "exotic" birding, on Sunday we took a trip to the Windsor area to look for any signs of winter finch invasion. We had high hopes of White-winged Crossbills and Boreal Chickadees simply dripping off the trees. Secretly, though, I feared the worst -- no birds but instead the dreaded SNOW! I have to admit I'm still not quite ready for that! Luckily in most places we were confronted with just a dusting...both of snow and birds unfortunately.

A new area we found when doing our atlasing this past summer included a wonderful group of spruce trees along Flintstone Rd. off of Rt. 9 (just west of where Rt. 8A turns north to the Moran WMA.)

This was one of the few areas where we had good numbers of crossbills and found our only Boreal Chickadee of the day. While there were lots of birds here, things seemed rather quiet in most of the other spots we checked. It seemed the forested areas were getting ready for winter.

Windsor Jambs (in the Windsor State Forest) proved to be another spot where we came across some birds... but not in any great numbers as we had hoped.

We left the area with some nice sightings of White-winged Crossbills and one territorial Pileated Woodpecker.

On the way home we stopped off in Amherst and met Val Miller for lunch. A quick stop at the Worcester Airport (hoping for Snowy Owl) turned up nothing so we called it a day and headed home to the cats.

Sheila

Sandhill Crane in New Braintree!

Coming home from Quabbin we decided to take back roads. The reason was Mark felt it would be a perfect day to look for a Sandhill Crane. Damn if he wasn't right!!! Sure enough along Hardwick Road in New Braintree (just west of Winimusset Meadows) at the back side of a mowed cornfield was an adult Sandhill Crane. He/she was trying to stay out of the wind so hopefully it was going to stay for a little while, since we called as many Worcester County birders whose numbers I had programmed into my cellphone.

Barrows Goldeneye at Wachusett Res

This morning (in between downpours) we found a beautiful male Barrows at Wachusett. The following photos were taken quite a ways off (under not-so-great conditions) so I do apologize for the lack of crispness. We sent out notices in between the two visits to the reservoir, so I hope other birders got out to see the bird. BTW the flock was in South Bay (along Rt. 140) near the eastern end. There were fishermen around, so the birds were moving a bit. The first flock we had there had 22 birds, when we went back 2 hrs. later, there were only 9 males -- some of the other males and all the females were gone. We also had a nice flock of 7 Horned Grebes from the Scar Hill bluffs.

Another Westport Weekend, but first.....

Saturday morning was spent checking out blocks from our section of the Breeding Bird Atlas that were still not taken. We poked around in some areas of Southbridge (and Sturbridge) right along Rt. 84 and found some areas with which we were just not familiar. Not many birds, but definitely some promising areas.....little known facts....

a new Osprey nest that we definitely hadn't heard about...

and other interesting sightings!

On Sunday, we were torn between going all the way out to Provincetown to look for the Black-tailed Gull and trying for Cave Swallows in the Westport area. We chose Westport....but we did not get Cave Swallows. Our walk out Gooseberry Neck proved to turn up some of the same species that we had on our last two trips over the past month.

Yellow-rumped Warbler is always a cinch to spish in and allows the satisfaction of knowing you'll get at least one good shot.

We had several Palm Warblers -- which we had not had on our previous 2 trips. And a Prairie and Magnolia Warbler, both of which weren't very cooperative for me in terms of photography.

But the male House Finch obliged....

and most surprisingly was the very photographic Grasshopper Sparrow we had the week before. It was exactly in the same area as last week, so I'm not sure what's going on with this bird.

And we wondered whether the Downy Woodpecker zipping around near the end of the Neck was a breeder or a migrant.

Other interesting sightings in Acoxet and the Westport area in general included a group of Yellow-bellied Sapsucker chasing each other around a small group of trees near the new store/cafe near the turn off to Adamsville.

And the ducks, as ususal, proved to be challenging subjects for photography. This female Greater Scaup was actually on the ocean with a small group of female Black Scoters.

If you click on the photos to zoom in you can see the characteristics of this adult female Black Scoter and this juvenile female Black Scoter.

However, the White-winged Scoters we saw for the most part tended to be in all-male flocks.

Shorebirds tended to be as expected, with some lingering yellow-legs and Black-bellied Plover, along with the larger flocks of Sanderling. This lone BB Plover allowed a fairly close approach.

While nowhere near the gull show that the Cape has been experiencing, the Ring-billed Gull flocks seemed to be building. So it's always worthwhile keeping an eye out for the rarity.

Sunday night came too soon yet again.....

A Great Weekend Part II -- Sunday at Gooseberry Neck

This was our last class trip of the season, and we had cancelled our trip to Westport twice before due to wind and rain. There must have been a reason, because today was fabulous. We started out at Gooseberry Neck at about 8:30....rather late and the class commented on it. As we started down the road, we had a nice show of House Finch....

And the usual conglomeration of Yellow-rumped Warblers. Thank goodness their call note is so distinctive, because it was a little breezy and these fellows just kept flying.

We were shocked to have a 3-4 Clouded Sulphurs.....

and an American Lady even!

But the real show of the morning were the flocks and flocks and flocks of Pine Siskins coming in off the water and moving towards the mainland. It was just like the flight of Bluejays we had two weeks ago......and much like those darn jays, these Siskins were whipping over. Sorry for the poor photos, but trying to get a group of 30 birds in focus in the sky as they fly past you very fast....well you understand.

At least in this photo you can see the prominent yellow wingstripe on a couple of the males as they whipped by!

But the highlight of the day, by far, was the Grasshopper Sparrow that virtually stayed in the same spot...we had him on the way down the road and the way back. We wanted to make absolutely sure that it wasn't a Henslow's Sparrow, and I felt the pressure as everyone kept saying "wait til we check the photos against a field guide". That assumes the photos are going to come out. I think I still suffer from my decades shooting slides with a 500mm mirror lens. I used to dread when the slides would be developed after 2 weeks and I'd throw nearly 50% out.

But that wasn't the case today.

I could probably post another 20-25 photos that show the bird doing virtually the same things. This is one case where the shots came out.

The facial markings (especially on the right side) were noticeably orangey.

An absolutely wonderful way to end the class and the weekend.

A Great Weekend Part I -- A Quabbin Morning and Black Scoters inland in Rhode Island

Friday promised to be such a great day I decided to call in and take an unscheduled vacation day. I didn't have any meetings scheduled and Mark's interview got cancelled. And I realized that I have only so many days like this left in my life so I thought this was one to enjoy. We decided to head out to Quabbin to see if there were any ducks starting to put down (like scoters) and we were treated to some of the last fall foliage. Many of trees have started to take on that bare November look, but there were still some wonderful splashes of color left to enjoy.

As we scanned the water in front of the Administration Building looking for the elusive scoters or any ducks, we were sidetracked by a group of turkeys coming in to eat the crab apples that had fallen. They didn't seem to mind being photographed and it was amazing to see all the colors they displayed depending on the lighting.

We were surprised by both an adult and immature Bald Eagle flying out from the trees near the Administration Building and heading out to other parts of Quabbin or possibly the trout farm for an early morning breakfast.

We did NOT have any scoters and landbirds were few and far between, so we headed back to Worcester making a short detour to check for scoters on Lake Quaboag. We dipped on the scoters there as well, but were treated to a flock of Snow Buntings feeding along the boat launch and in the parking lot. This made up for my missing the one at Quabbin which Mark had when he walked across Winsor Dam.

As much as I love seeing these birds, it always sends a chill down my spine to think that winter is waiting right around the corner. After all they are SNOW Buntings!

Always good to see them in green grass though....

Then on Saturday morning, we headed down to Cumberland, RI to check for waterfowl there. We needed to do a fairly quick trip since we had a presentation we were doing in the afternoon on the Breeding Bird Atlas project for the Worcester County atlasers.

We were delighted to find a fairly good-sized flock of Black Scoters at Diamond Hill Reservoir in Cumberland.

When we got home we found out from Massbird that Saturday was "the day" for scoters throughout many inland locations. In fact driving up 146 we stopped at several places and found at last 1 Black Scoter at a number of ponds and reservoirs in the Blackstone Corridor.

All in all....a very satisfying morning!