Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

eBird tells me I saw a moderate 287 species last year. There are probably a few here and there I didn’t report. 169 of those were in Kings County. I didn’t travel to any new locations this year, so I only managed four life birds (and three if you don’t count the invasive Pin-tailed Whydah) but they were all really good ones:

• Hammond’s Flycatcher Central Park–The Ramble US-NY 02 Dec 2017
• Corn Crake Cedar Beach, general area US-NY 08 Nov 2017
• Parakeet Auklet Land’s End–seawatch US-CA 25 Jul 2017
• Pin-tailed Whydah Canyon Park US-CA 17 Jun 2017

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Between my eye surgery in March that took 6 months to fully recover from and a major writing commitment that occupied most of my weekends before that, 2015 was not my best birding year. Nonetheless, I did manage trips to Oregon and Hawaii; and some rarities visited my “backyard.”

According to eBird, I added 20 species to my life list in 2015, though many of those are introduced exotics in Hawaii. Hawaii doesn’t seem to have a bird records committee, so there’s no one to rule on which ones “count” and which ones don’t. Clearly native birds like Wedge-tailed Shearwater and Hawaiian Coot count, but what to do about Red-crested Cardinal and Hwamei?
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Red-tailed Hawk with dead mouse
Brooklyn Botanic Garden native flora garden at noon

Chipping Sparrow in Fall Migration, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

For the last ten years or so, the real markers of the holiday season for me are the annual Christmas Bird Counts. I try to get to as many of these as I can. Yesterday was Kings County’s (which actually includes part of Queens County for reasons of convexity). This year I counted at Jacob Riis Park and Fort Tilden on a beautiful cloudy winter day. Conditions were ideal for sea watching, and we had a lot of great birds including all three scoter species (maybe more than a thousand Black Scoters), hundreds of Red-throated Loons, and eight Common Eiders.

However for me the highlight was three Common Waxwings that Joshua Malbin and I found in the woods at Fort Tilden. Shockingly, these were the only Cedar Waxwings anyone saw anywhere in the count circle yesterday, which makes them a save. They usually aren’t that hard to find, and we didn’t think much about them when we did see them. If we hadn’t bushwhacked the overgrown trail behind the West Battery, or been a few minutes earlier or later when we did, the entire count would have missed Cedar Waxwing this year.
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As dusk was approaching we drove into the small city of Orotina. In the trees encircled in the town square, we found a lot of sloths, apparently released pets. But the real prize was a Black-and-white Owl our guide, Richard Garrigues, had staked out:

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