#476 Inca Dove
For birders the most important part of the solstice season is not presents under the tree or turkey (at least not domestic turkey) but rather the bird counts that end one year and start the next and that have done so for 110 years now. The annual Christmas Bird Count takes place globally for a couple of weeks around Christmas. You can usually find one near pretty much any significant human habitation. This year I did the Brooklyn count on the Saturday before Christmas, the Central Park count on the Sunday before Christmas, and then flew to New Orleans for the New Orleans East count on the Saturday after Christmas (and also to visit family, I feel compelled to mention). It’s especially fun to do bird counts in areas you don’t know all that well, because you’re virtually guaranteed to find something interesting and new.
On Saturday the interesting and new bird for me was an Inca Dove, or rather four of them I spotted in a Live Oak tree in a vacant lot along Hayne Boulevard across the street from Lake Pontchartrain. No photos I’m afraid. On bird counts I usually don’t bring a camera so I can concentrate on finding and counting the birds rather than on photographing them.
Overall, we tallied about 90 or so species in our section of the count circle. That’s somewhat under the 101 we saw back in 2006, but that year we also covered large chunks of Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge and a Mangrove Cuckoo found by another team. This year we just covered Lake Pontchartrain and the surrounding suburban areas, so we able to do a smaller area in more depth.
I don’t have the final tally numbers yet, but the species list is roughly:
- Gadwall
- Mallard
- Blue-winged Teal
- Ring-necked Duck
- Lesser Scaup
- Greater Scaup (*)
- Bufflehead
- Common Goldeneye
- Hooded Merganser
- Red-breasted Merganser
- Ruddy Duck
- Common Loon
- Pied-billed Grebe
- Horned Grebe
- American White Pelican
- Brown Pelican
- Double-crested Cormorant
- Anhinga
- Great Blue Heron
- Great Egret
- Snowy Egret
- Little Blue Heron
- Tricolored Heron
- Cattle Egret
- Black-crowned Night-Heron
- White Ibis
- Turkey Vulture
- Osprey
- Red-shouldered Hawk
- Red-tailed Hawk
- American Kestrel
- Common Moorhen
- American Coot
- Black-bellied Plover
- Semipalmated Plover
- Killdeer
- Sanderling (*)
- Spotted Sandpiper
- Dunlin (*)
- Ruddy Turnstone
- Wilson’s Snipe
- Laughing Gull
- Ring-billed Gull
- Herring Gull
- Forster’s Tern
- Caspian Tern (*)
- Royal Tern
- Black Skimmer
- Rock Pigeon
- Eurasian Collared-Dove
- White-winged Dove
- Mourning Dove
- Inca Dove
- Monk Parakeet
- Belted Kingfisher
- Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
- Downy Woodpecker
- Northern Flicker
- Eastern Phoebe
- Great Horned Owl (*)
- Loggerhead Shrike
- Bell’s Vireo (*)
- Blue-headed Vireo
- Blue Jay
- American Crow
- Fish Crow
- Tree Swallow
- Carolina Chickadee
- Carolina Wren
- House Wren
- Golden-crowned Kinglet (*)
- Ruby-crowned Kinglet
- Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
- Gray Catbird (*)
- Northern Mockingbird
- European Starling
- American Pipit
- Orange-crowned Warbler
- Yellow-rumped Warbler
- Pine Warbler
- Prairie Warbler (*)
- Savannah Sparrow
- Song Sparrow
- Seaside Sparrow (*)
- Swamp Sparrow
- White-throated Sparrow
- Northern Cardinal
- Boat-tailed Grackle
- American Goldfinch
- House Finch (*)
- House Sparrow
(If it’s starred I didn’t see it myself, but others in the group did.)
