Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

A belated announcement of a milestone in my home county. On July 20, 2024 at Plumb Beach, Brown Pelican was my 300th species for Kings County. I saw this pair on a Brooklyn Bird Club field trip led by Peter Dorosh.

The count does not included escapees and hybrids. It does include introduced and established species like Monk Parakeet, Mute Swan, and the ubiquitous Rock Pigeon.

I initially thought this was #299, but I didn’t realize I was not counting a Thick-Billed Murre I had seen in Dead Horse Bay back in 2005 before I started keeping regular eBird lists.
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I’ve had a little more time for local birding this year. I actually managed to get my sixth (and final expected) woodpecker for Brooklyn on February 8, a Red-headed Woodpecker that has set up housekeeping in Greenwood Cemetery:

This is months earlier than I’ve traditionally done it, but thanks to global heating and the fossil fuel industry, Northern Flickers and Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers are now spending the winter here. Red-bellied Woodpecker is another traditionally southern species, especially in the winter, that moved northward with rising temperatures decades ago. Downy and Hairy are the only two that should be around right now. I even heard a repeated double tap in Prospect Park today and looked around because, well, you never know.
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My life list for Jefferson Parish is embarrassingly low given that it’s where I grew up. Part of that is that the East Bank where I lived doesn’t have a lot of good habitat, even compared to adjacent Orleans Parish. If I ever get down to Grand Isle, I should pick up a bunch of species, but for now it’s been a slog of chasing one or two species at a time. Last week there were maybe three I could have gotten without crossing the river. I tried for two and found one after a couple of tries: Savannah Sparrow.

I found this one on the last morning of my trip at the Bucktown Marina, which is rapidly developing into a really nice hot spot with some good habitat. It is a shame that most of the rest of the Jefferson Parish lakefront has been mowed into oblivion. It had far more interesting brushy habitat when I was living there last century. Who else remembers Mr. Walter’s Park? I never did find out who Mr. Walters was. Now I wish I had met him.

Overall 2024 was a slow year. I didn’t travel anywhere I hadn’t been before, and I lost a month of prime rarity season in New York to a bout with pneumonia that put me in the hospital for over a week. But there were still some interesting birds to be found the rest of the year.

I finished the year with 364 species total (surprisingly 19 more than 2023, perhaps because I traveled to the West Coast a couple of times for the first time since quarantine) but no life birds. (Harris’s Sparrow was new on my ebird life list, but I did see one on Long Island years ago before eBird was a thing.) I did pick up some species for my state and county lists though.
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2023 was a decent year, especially here in Brooklyn where I added eight birds (almost 9) to my county list. I still haven’t left the country since quarantine, but I did make two trips to New Orleans and two to Arizona, so there were a few life birds to add. I finished the year with 345 species total (20 fewer than 2022) and 6 life birds (all in Arizona).
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I continue to be amazed at the number of “pro” photographers who continue to not understand crop sensors and the importance of pixel pitch, especially for wildlife photography. After watching a number of YouTube videos about rumored upcoming Canon cameras, every single one talks about the full frame sensor as an advantage, and this is exactly wrong.
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