Yesterday afternoon I hopped over to Jamaica Bay to look for the White-faced Ibis Sean Sime and Rob Jett found on Thursday. I didn’t locate it, nor did a couple of other birders who were out looking. (I did hear that it was relocated this morning, exactly where it was on Thursday. Maybe it’s just a morning bird.) However I did get some wonderful closeup looks at my first Indigo Bunting this year:
Yesterday I joined the Brooklyn Bird Club on a trip led by Peter Dorosh to the Northern Reaches of Nassau and Queens Counties. Overall there were fourteen participants including Starr Saphir, Lenore Swenson, Michael Zablocky, Sandi Paci, Suzanne Ortiz, and myself. We jumped from park to park along the coast, usually spending between 30 and 90 minutes at each. While you don’t get to explore any one site in detail, and may miss some birds that are present, this strategy does produce a high total species count. The complete list for the day was 71, though I’m not sure if anyone in the group personally saw each of the 71.
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One frequent question novice birders ask is which field guide they should purchase? You can find a bewildering array on store shelves. Which ones are actually useful in the field and which ones are essentially coffee table books? Fortunately the decision isn’t hard. North American birders (more specifically AOU area birders) generally divide into two groups, followers of the old testament and followers of the new.
Thursday afternoon I decided to make one last trip to Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View to look for the Burrowing Owls. I didn’t find any, but I did find a Jackrabbit, numerous American Coots, and 14 Surf Scoters:
This morning I led Software Development’s first ever Birds of a Feather on the subject of birding. 10 hearty, early rising attendees gathered in the hotel lobby at 6:00 A.M. where we shared three cabs to Sunnyvale Baylands Park. From there the plan was to follow the water back to the hotel.
This afternoon I took a quick spin out to Sunnyvale Baylands Park to scout out the route for tomorrow morning’s BoF, and make sure no one had thrown up fences in the route.
