Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

Thursday I took a long drive (well long for Iceland– the whole country’s about the size of Kentucky) around the Reykjanesbær peninsula. I didn’t see many birds though. The last stop was a small migrant trap called Seltjörn on the road between Njarðvík and Grindavik. This is a park where someone has planted a lot of conifers along a hillside. Iceland doesn’t have a lot of trees, so places like this attract occasional European vagrants. I didn’t find any rarities, but the woods were filled with Redwings, and I’d occasionally encounter a small flock of Common Redpolls.

However the real prize was in the fields west of the trees. Here I flushed two birds that flew rapidly out of the grass and away from me. They looked vaguely like a cross between a shorebird and a Mourning Dove. At first I thought they might be more European Golden Plovers, which I’d been seeing everywhere but that didn’t seem quite right. They didn’t act like them, and this wasn’t the ideal habitat either, but in migration birds can show up anywhere. However 15 minutes later in the way back I flushed a third that burst out of the ground and flew a long looping flight until it landed back in the grass about a hundred meters away from me. This time I was able to get my binoculars on it while it was in flight, and the obvious long straight bill made it very clear this was no plover. (The key defining characteristic of the plover family are their short, stubby bills.) The flight, behavior, bill, and pattern made it really obvious this was a Snipe, and in Iceland more specifically a Common Snipe. This is very closely related to America’s Wilson’s Snipe. Indeed until quite recently they were considered to be the same species, but in 2002 the AOU split them.

I arrived in Iceland early this morning and despite hopes for Ptarmigans in the airport parking lot my first Icelandic species was — wait for it — European Starling on the old U.S. Air Force base. Worse yet, it turns out that even though Iceland is in Europe, the starlings aren’t even native here. I’m told they first showed up about 30 years ago. (I have seen European Starling in London and the Netherlands, where they are native birds so I can still include that one on my life list even under the strictest rules.)

That was pretty much it till the afternoon when I got down to the harbor and turned up 11 more species. The first lifer, #510, was a European Shag next to a Great Cormorant. No pictures yet since it was raining and I didn’t want to drag my camera or my scope out in the rain. I’ll try and grab some tomorrow when the sun comes out. There were a few around.
(more…)

I wasn’t initially planning to go out to Prospect Park on Labor Day. Given that I live right at the end of the route for the West Indian Day Parade, the crowds of the noise are usually quite excessive. It’s just too much trouble to get up and down Eastern Parkway. However, when I heard from Peter Dorosh that a Mourning Warbler had been seen at the south end of the Vale of Kashmir, right near where I usually enter the park, it was just too tempting.

I headed out just after 11:00 AM. Fortunately the start of the parade was just beginning to reach the end of the Eastern Parkway, and the crowds are not too excessive yet submitted to the park fairly quickly and got to the Vale about 11:15. I promptly ran into Tom Stephenson who was also out looking for the bird and hoping to photograph it. We wandered around a bit, later being joined by Phil Malek, and kept looking for the Mourning Warbler. We had some tantalizing possibilities but nothing that looked definite, especially given that there were at least two and probably more Common Yellowthroats wandering around in the vicinity.

The Mourning Warbler is not an especially uncommon bird around here, but it is one that is relatively hard to find because it is a real skulker. It likes to get down in the leaf litter and below the leaves and not come out very much where it can be seen. Tom played the calls and the song of the Mourning Warbler but we didn’t get any responses. That’s not too surprising in the fall when birds are generally not singing and not paying much attention to their song.

Round about noon, Tom decided give up the search and headed home before the parade traffic got too disastrous; and as often happens about 10 minutes later as I was walking along the fence down toward Nellies Lawn, up popped the bird. It was a small brown bird with a completely yellow underside. It was considerably thinner and pointier than a female Common Yellowthroat, the most similar local species. However a Yellowthroat is a much fatter bird. It usually looks like it swallowed a ping-pong ball. This bird was much skinnier and showed complete yellow underneath, not just yellow on the throat and the undertail coverts. The bird also had either a thin eye ring or eye arcs — I didn’t have quite long enough look to tell whether the eye ring was connected or not. On the Mourning Warbler you’d expect that it wouldn’t be connected; on a Yellowthroat you’d expect that it would be. I couldn’t definitively say one way or the other. However, given the expensive yellow on the underside of the bird all the way down to the undertail coverts, and especially given the shape of the bird which was very slender not at all yellowthroat like, I’m very confident in saying that this was a Mourning Warbler.
(more…)

Common Nighthawk has been off my life list for an embarrassingly long time despite the fact that I’ve lived smack in the middle of its breeding range for about the last 20 years. To make matters worse, this is a bird that can be seen easily from a mile away; and it’s not really hard to identify it. The only thing that makes the common nighthawks a little challenging is that it does come out in the evening after most birders who gone home for the day. If you get up at 6 AM to catch the dawn chorus, you’re going to be pretty tired by the time you see your first Nighthawk. It pretty much requires a special trip. Nonetheless, it isn’t that hard to find and yet for reasons I can’t fully explain, I have missed it time and time again for years. For instance, a few years ago nighthawks were flying over the Turtle Pond in Central Park every night for several weeks until the night I took the subway out there to see them at which point apparently every last one of them had decided to migrate south. I have gone on nighttime walks in Prospect Park, and shown up two minutes after nighthawks flew over and everyone else saw them but me. I have been out to numerous locations where they are known to fly nightly and still managed to miss them time and time again. Most recently, yesterday, Saturday, I was on a Brooklyn Bird Club trip to Jamaica Bay when the leader got separated from the group. He saw two nighthawks fly over while I was busy looking at yet another Black-throated Blue Warbler.

(more…)

Surely I’ve seen a Winter Wren before now? Well, yes I have. Many times and on more than one continent. However, the American Ornithological Union has just split the species into 3, Pacific Wren (Troglodytes pacificus) in the Pacific Northwest, Winter Wren (Troglodytes hyemalis), back here in New York, and Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) in Eurasia. In fact, I’ve seen all three, Troglodytes hyemalis from New York and other locations, Troglodytes pacificus in the Bay Area in California, and Troglodytes troglodytes from Europe. I’m not sure which I saw first, Eastern or European. It may actually have been the European species back when I first started getting serious about this.

Sunday morning Janet Schumacher and I drove out to Cupsogue Beach County Park on the south shore of Long Island to look for the Hudsonian Godwit that had been reported there since the previous weekend. I first saw it at low tide around 9:15 AM on the first sandbar in the bay, visible from just past the trailer parking area. However the bill looked a little off and I wasn’t sure before the bird took off. Could have been a Dowitcher in intermediate plumage. Then, after walking a mile out to the point and back again, we relocated it at exactly the same spot and got much better looks at it, including a few (bad) photographs.

At least I hope that’s the bird. (Lower right foreground) It was easier to see through the scope which gives you much several times more magnification than my 400mm lens (roughly equivalent to a pair of binoculars). To get this much I had to scan along the sandbar snapping away and then blow up the photos later at home.

(more…)