Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

Saturday I joined David Muth, my brother Tommy Harold, and about a dozen others for the New Orleans Christmas Bird Count. Over the course of the day, the various teams tallied up 139 species, including four personal life birds and a state first record.

We met at 6:00 A.M. at the McDonald’s off the Reed Blvd. I-10 exit (New Orleans East for non-locals) to divide up areas and arrange teams. McDonald’s wasn’t open because their computers were down, but they let us in to organize matters anyway. We were a little short handed because one team leader was stuck in Colorado due to the Denver airport mess. Tommy and I joined up with count leader David Muth to cover Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge and areas west to about Lakefront Airport.

We started the morning at Seabrook Bridge just before 7:00. David knew this as the most reliable place to find Caspian Tern and Black Skimmer, though we had to get there early before they took off hunting breakfast. We found 5 Caspian Terns (my first life bird of the day), 20 Black Skimmers, and 1 Royal Tern. We also tallied 50 Ring-billed Gulls, 5 Herring Gulls, 2 Brown Pelicans, 1 Spotted Sandpiper, 1 Great Blue Heron, 85 American Coots, 102 Laughing Gulls, and several Double-crested Cormorants. (Aside from the singletons, numbers are best estimates. Birds kept flying in and out making it hard to get a perfect count.)

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A little treat for Gurnenthar’s Ascendance. Here’s a non-avian I spotted Saturday on the New Orleans Christmas Bird Count:

Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, 2006-12-23

On yesterday’s New Orleans Christmas Bird Count, Glenn Ousset found a Mangrove Cuckoo in Chalmette. Word spread by cell phone, and I think all the teams abandoned their official area to catch this rarity, before returning to scout their assigned locations for more prosaic birds like Mottled Ducks and White-winged Doves.

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Peter Dorosh just sent me the final tally for Saturday’s Brooklyn Bird Count. This includes all of Kings County as well as Breezy Point, Jacob Riis Park, Fort Tilden, and the West Pond of Jamaica Bay (which aren’t offically in Brooklyn but make for a more circular area):
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Yesterday was the annual Kings County/Queens County Christmas Bird Count. I did the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens with Nancy Tim and Liz White. We found 30 species total, a surprisingly large number. I’ve been in the gardens a lot lately and haven’t seen nearly this much. It just goes to show that if you go out early, look carefully, and walk slowly, there’s more out there than you think.
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