This time I even got close enough to make out some of the leg band:

Then 30 miles northeast to Upper Lake in Yaphank for my life Trumpeter Swans. The lake had also frozen over, but there was a little water in the far north corner of the lake, and there they were:

Only it turns out to due to captive breeding and release programs Trumpeter Swans aren’t accepted as countable in New York. Double Damn. This is actually the 5th swan species for my list (after Mute, Black, Whooper and Tundra) but only 2–Mute and Tundra–are countable where I saw them.

Apologies for the photo, by the way. The birds were far away, and I’m back to my Tamron 28-300 for the moment while I wait out the rumored 3 Canon releases in February. Maybe I’ll rent a 400 f/4 DO in the meantime. I have been haunting Craig’s List and eBay, but not actually winning anything so far.

The swans had been reported much closer to the publicly accessible viewing area and within easy photo range, but that was before the lake froze over. Fortunately I had a scope. Otherwise I could have never ID’d the relevant field marks on these two. In this photo you can see the large, sloping black bills, and in binoculars you could make out the black legs, both of which rule out the common invasive Mute Swan. However the scope was necessary to establish that there wasn’t any yellow around the eye, which would have tunred thes two into the somewhat more common Tundra swans.

As I was finishing up at Upper Lake, some other birders drove up who reported that they’d heard from the Internet that the Dovekie had been seen today, so I raced back to Timber Point. Only the reports proved wrong. The Internet reports had been of previous days’ sightings. The Dovekie has likely returned to its natural home on the open ocean (we hope). Swim well little bird.

A99 from Gravesend Bay was banded at the Upper Blackstone Wastewater Treatment Plant in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 5, 2008. Sex unknown and born in 2005 or earlier.

A288 from Prospect Park was banded at the Quinsigamond State Park in Worcester County, Massachusetts on October 27, 2009, just a few months before I saw it. Sex unknown and born in 2008 or earlier. (Probably 2008 would be my guess based on the bird’s plumage when I found it.)

At first it had its head tucked in, and I thought it was a Northern Shoveler, but when it swam away the head and bill were clearly Mallard like. Probably can’t be sure without a blood sample, but it looks to me like a Mallard x Northern Shoveler. I’m not sure if this is a known (or even possible) combination. Or it could be a hybrid with some other species. Mallards regularly hybridize with almost anything vaguely duck-like. It could also be an escapee exotic from some distant land like the Australasian Shoveler. Just yesterday I miscalled a Cape Shelduck as an immature Black-bellied Whistling Duck. Or it could be a full-blooded drake Mallard with aberrant plumage.

Anyone ever seen a bird like this before? For that matter, is there a good reference that covers all the world’s waterfowl? As Sibley writes, “virtually any of the world’s waterfowl species can occasionally be seen free-flying in North America.”

Likely all the wing tagged gulls that are showing up lately are coming from Massachusetts where Dr. Tom French has been banding gulls. I should know more shortly. Multiple birders have been reporting them around the city. This is possibly the fourth from Prospect Lake alone.

Update: yep, this bird was banded at the Quinsigamond State Park in Worcester County, Massachusetts on October 27, 2009, just a few months before I saw it. Sex unknown and born in 2008 or earlier. (Probably 2008 would be my guess based on the bird’s plumage when I found it.)

Total species count for the morning was a respectable 27:

1. Canada Goose
2. Mute Swan
3. American Black Duck
4. Mallard
5. Northern Shoveler
6. Bufflehead
7. Ruddy Duck
8. American Coot
9. Ring-billed Gull
10. Herring Gull
11. Great Black-backed Gull
12. Rock Pigeon
13. Mourning Dove
14. Cooper’s Hawk
15. Red-bellied Woodpecker
16. Downy Woodpecker
17. Blue Jay
18. American Crow
19. Black-capped Chickadee
20. Tufted Titmouse
21. White-breasted Nuthatch
22. Carolina Wren
23. Hermit Thrush
24. European Starling
25. White-throated Sparrow
26. Dark-eyed Junco (Slate-colored)
27. Northern Cardinal

Oh and some Purple Sandpipers too:

And some Ruddy Turnstones:

And some Long-tailed Ducks:

And Dunlin:

And Black-bellied Plovers:

In fact, there were more of some of these species than I’ve seen in my life, and within easy shooting range. Many of these birds are often seen far away as dots in the scope, if at all. At Barnegat they were naked eye birds. I should have gone there sooner. I did sign up for one previous trip with the Brooklyn Bird Club last year, but it was canceled due to rain. Better late than never.

Total species count for the day was about 30:

1. Brant
2. Harlequin Duck
3. Surf Scoter
4. Long-tailed Duck
5. Mallard
6. American Black Duck
7. Hooded Merganser
8. Red-breasted Merganser
9. Common Loon
10. Great Cormorant
11. Black-bellied Plover
12. Ruddy Turnstone
13. Sanderling
14. Purple Sandpiper
15. Dunlin
16. Northern Mockingbird
17. Ring-billed Gull
18. Herring Gull
19. Great Black-backed Gull
20. Rock Pigeon
21. Mourning Dove
22. American Crow
23. American Robin
24. European Starling
25. Cedar Waxwing
26. Yellow-rumped Warbler
27. Savannah Sparrow (Ipswich)
28. House Sparrow
29. European Starling
30. Belted Kingfisher (at the truck stop on I-95)

Although any number of vagrants and accidentals could still show up, there are only a few regular species in New York City still left for my life list. Common Nighthawk is a summer resident. To find it, I need to spend more time in the parks around dusk in the summer. Mourning Warbler comes through every year on migration. It just hides really well. Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow is possible at Marine Park and other locations along the coast. There are also a few species in the city that I only have from elsewhere. American Bittern, for instance, was relatively easy to find at Upper Newport Bay near where I lived in Irvine; but although it breeds in Jamaica Bay I’ve never seen it in New York.

I arrived at Bay 16th St. shortly after dawn, and walked across the pedestrian bridge over the Belt Parkway to the bike path that follows the curve of the bay. The temperature was several degrees below freezing and the wind off the bay, while not as bad as it sometimes is, certainly didn’t help matters. I was hoping to quickly find the bird on the grass along the bike path where it had been seen the previous day and several times earlier, but no such luck. A couple of dozen gulls were flying over the bay, but even if a Common Gull were one of them it would be extremely hard to distinguish in this light at that distance. The Common Gull is very similar to a Ring-billed Gull. It’s about an inch smaller and does not show an obvious ring around the bill. Also, the legs are gray instead of dirty yellow, the eye is black instead of yellow, and there is a little more white along the base of the mantle. Exactly none of these field marks are obvious on a flying bird 20 meters away.

I walked up and down along the path waiting for some gulls to come in closer where I might have a chance at picking out a Common Gull. I saw what looked like a couple of fairly large shorebirds fly up the rocks. Heading up the way they proved to be Purple Sandpipers, the closest I’ve ever seen. I had a great deal of trouble finding these a few years ago, and now here they were right in front of me. Unfortunately they weren’t the bird I was looking for today.

I ran into a couple of other birders who had come to look for the gull, and showed them the Purples, and then we hunkered down to wait for the gull. Gulls flew in and out, but no Common Gull. I lasted another hour until about 8:30 when the cold just got too much for me. Since there didn’t seem to be a lot of action happening here, we traded cell phone numbers in case it showed up and I drove over to the end of Bay Parkway where the gull had first been spotted. It looked promising, especially when I realized there was someone from a bakery feeding a large box of stale bread to the rampant gull flock, but although there were numerous Ring-billed Gulls and not a few Rock Pigeons, that was all. The common gull was not to be found here either, at least not this morning.

I continued on to Floyd Bennett Field. I expected to be paged that the gull had appeared as soon as I got on the Belt Parkway, but no such luck. I got to Floyd Bennett Field at 9:00 and drove straight to the cricket field. Sure enough, there were about 20 Eastern Meadowlarks grazing not far from the sidewalk. Was one of them a Longspur? With binoculars I really couldn’t tell, so I went back to the car and got my scope, then carefully walked back, trying not to spook them. Scoping the flock, there was one that didn’t look quite right. It had a lot less yellow than a Meadowlark does, but these were very small birds very far away in grass that, though cut, was almost as tall as they were. How to be sure? I eventually got reasonably confident that it wasn’t a meadowlark, because I could always relocate it amongst the meadowlarks, and although it showed more yellow than I was expecting it didn’t come close to the bright yellow of the meadowlarks.

Sometimes a meadowlark would turn away and not look so lemon yellow, but invariably after it kinked its head back again and especially when it looked straight at you, you’d immediately see a huge splash of yellow. This bird never had that, just a light wash of waxy yellow on only part of its face. And the more I looked at it the more I realized that in profile the facial pattern was different than the meadowlark’s too. This bird had a sort of brown, triangular outline around its face. Bingo. That’s a Longspur. Now which one? Probably a birder with a more experience of Longspurs could have just eyeballed this one, but I haven’t seen but a couple in my life so I needed to be careful and check the field marks and the field guide. Lapland is the most common species around here, but Smith’s and Chestnut-collared are not impossible.

For that I had to go to the back and belly (and consult the field guide again. The belly was a little hard to make out in the grass, but eventually it spent enough time in shorter grass to make it apparent that the belly was white, which ruled out Smith’s. The overall color and patterning on the back looked a lot more like the brighter Lapland than the dull (at this time of year) Chestnut-collared. There it was. #477. I then tried for some better photographs but got nothing more than what you see above, that may not even have the bird in the frame. It was just too far away and too small for my 400mm lens. The scope was necessary. I could not have found this bird with binoculars alone. Shortly after this, the flock left and headed out for wherever they spend the rest of their day. But my day wasn’t over yet.

My cell phone had not yet rung so I figured I had a little bit more time to explore Floyd Bennett Field. I spent a little time in the community gardens, and out along the bay at the end of the archery road and runway 2. I wasn’t really expecting to find anything spectacular. Mostly I just wanted to compare my results with the Canon 400 mm f/5.6L lens to the photographs I had taken at the same location a few weeks earlier with the 300 mm f/4L lens. Short answer: the 400 mm lens is much superior to the 300 mm lens despite the lack of image stabilization. Partially it’s the extra reach, and partially it’s just that it’s a much sharper lens. A few my photographer friends have expressed some surprise that these results and suggested that perhaps I just had a bad copy of the 300 mm lens. That may be so, but if it is, then there’s a real quality control problems at the factory. Certainly, I’ve seen some amazing photographs taken with the 300 mm lens that go way beyond anything I was ever able to achieve with it. I found the 400 mm lens much easier to work with. But enough about cameras. Let’s get back to birds.

I left Floyd Bennett Field about 10:30 and returned to Bay 16th Street for another try at the Common Gull. When I arrived, the bird had still not yet been seen that day. However, shortly after I got there, someone rode up on a bicycle and told us that the bird had been spotted north of us about a mile at the first parking lot past the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. So we all grabbed our scopes and trotted up there. Sure enough, there was a large flock of several hundred goals on the grass near the parking lot. We scoped it repeatedly, spotted one tagged gull, and even chummed the gulls with some bread. No luck. It took a while, but we eventually convinced ourselves that even if the bird had been there, it wasn’t there any longer. Somewhat dejectedly we walked back down to Bay 16th St. Along the way, we heard that the Common Gull had been seen for about half an hour right by the pedestrian overpass where we had started. I let out more than a few choice words. By the time we got back to Bay 16th St., the bird had departed again. This time, however, there were photographs to prove that the bird had indeed been there; and we’d missed it. Fuck.

By now it was almost noon, and I was more than a little hungry. Based on past reports the gull seemed to space its appearances out by an hour or more so I figured it was a reasonably safe time to decamp for lunch. Fortunately I was right. by the time I returned 45 minutes later, the bird had still not been seen again. Although the weather was not quite as bone chilling as it had been at 7 AM, it was still below freezing, and I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. I chatted with a couple of the birders from upstate who driven down to look for the gull and who had been somewhat more diligent than me in sticking with the spot. They still haven’t seen the bird either. At least I didn’t miss it while I ate lunch. That would have been too much.

We casually inspected the several dozen Ring-billed Gulls standing on the grass. No Common Gull. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. We chatted. We checked the gull flock. This went on for about 10 or 15 minutes. Then suddenly one of the upstaters says, “there’s the bird.” We had no idea where it came from. We hadn’t seen any bird fly in. At first, I couldn’t see the bird but they put me on it quickly. Once I saw it, it was obvious. It was a little smaller, but far more obviously the legs were gray instead of yellow and the bill didn’t have any black ring:

(In case it isn’t so obvious the Common Gull is on the right.)

Still, this is not exactly a bird would jump out at you as different if you were barreling along the bike path at 20 mph. In fact, you’d have to be looking pretty carefully to notice anything different at all. the bird hung out for about 10 minutes before passing car tossed out some litter and attracted the flock to the other side of the pedestrian overpass. In the confusion, the Common Gull took off and likely headed out across the bay somewhere.

Still, as life bird sightings go it was pretty convincing. Or at least it was until I got home and checked my records. I have been saying that this is my first to life bird day in Brooklyn in several years. But when I look at my official life list, I realized I had already seen Common Gull in Europe before. I had missed it previously because I was looking for Mew Gull, which I still haven’t seen. However Mew Gull and Common Gull are different subspecies of the same species, Larus canus. Common Gull is Larus canus canus and Mew Gull is Larus canus brachyrhynchus. Besides location, the subspecies differ mainly in how dark the matle is and how much black is present on the wingtips. These details I leave to the experts. Nonetheless, it was still an AOU area bird, a state bird, a North American bird, and a Kings County bird. That’s worth a few hours in the cold.

I’ve reported it. I hope I can find out more about this bird. This was far from the most interesting gull on the bay yesterday though. More about that later.

As expected, this bird was tagged at the Upper Blackstone Wastewater Treatment Plant in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 5, 2008. Sex unknown and born in 2005 or earlier.

The feeders on Breeze Hill supported Red-winged Blackbird, White-breasted Nuthatch, Downy Woodpecker, American Goldfinch, Black-capped Chickadee, and one Red-breasted Nuthatch. This is the only even remotely unusual bird I found. There haven’t been a lot of them in the park this season, and if there’s a good seed crop up north next winter, there might not be any. They’re an irruptive species. Some years they’re everywhere. Some years you have to struggle to find one or two in the county.

From Prospect Park 2010-01-10

The final spot that was worth checking out was the south end of the lake. Lots of gulls here, mostly Ring-billed but also at least one Herring Gull and a couple of Great Black-backed Gulls. One American Crow flew onto the ice. Most of the Northern Shovelers and Ruddy Ducks that sometimes number in the hundreds here seem to have decamped for less frozen climes but there were still a few of each, along with a couple of American Coots, six or so Mute Swans, a lone male Bufflehead, and many, many Canada Geese and Mallards. The feral Muscovy (possibly Mallard hybrid) is still hanging out too. One Red-tailed Hawk flew to the top of a tree on West Island.

Total species count was 23 including 7 new BGBY birds:

1. Canada Goose
2. Mute Swan
3. Mallard
4. Northern Shoveler
5. Bufflehead
6. Ruddy Duck
7. Red-tailed Hawk
8. American Coot
9. Ring-billed Gull
10. Herring Gull
11. Great Black-backed Gull
12. Rock Pigeon
13. Mourning Dove
14. Red-bellied Woodpecker
15. Downy Woodpecker
16. American Crow
17. Black-capped Chickadee
18. Tufted Titmouse
19. Red-breasted Nuthatch
20. White-breasted Nuthatch
21. American Robin
22. European Starling
23. White-throated Sparrow
24. Northern Cardinal
25. Red-winged Blackbird
26. American Goldfinch

Rusty Blackbird was a particularly good find, because they’re not common in the park. The only place they’re reliably found in new York City is van Cortland Park in the Bronx. However, 1 to 4 have been hanging out in Prospect at least since the Christmas Bird Count on the 19th.

1. Canada Goose
2. Wood Duck
3. American Black Duck
4. Mallard
5. Red-tailed Hawk
6. Ring-billed Gull
7. Rock Pigeon
8. Mourning Dove
9. Red-bellied Woodpecker
10. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
11. Downy Woodpecker
12. Blue Jay
13. Black-capped Chickadee
14. Tufted Titmouse
15. White-breasted Nuthatch
16. American Robin
17. Northern Mockingbird
18. Fox Sparrow
19. White-throated Sparrow
20. Dark-eyed Junco (Slate-colored)
21. Northern Cardinal
22. Red-winged Blackbird
23. Rusty Blackbird
24. House Finch
25. American Goldfinch
26. House Sparrow