Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

Today was (is) a throughly nasty, wet, rainy day; but it’s the first day the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s been open in the New Year. Since no one’s yet reported a Northern Mockingbird, and since that’s a relatively easy find in the garden (and a relatively hard one in the park) I took a quick spin around at lunch to grab one more year first. To my surprise, not only did I find the mockingbird I was looking for. I also bagged a late female Eastern Towhee that’s been hanging around the south end of the garden for the last month or so.

The rain kept most other birds out of their usual spots. There weren’t even any mallards in the pond. I did spot a few Northern Cardinals, a couple of Blue Jays, some White-throated Sparrows, two Black-capped Chickadees, and one Ring-billed Gull flying over.

At this point all the easy year birds have been logged. There won’t be any more until Spring migration kicks off; probably with grackles in February. Possibly someone could get a Sharpshinned Hawk, House Finch, or Winter Wren before then. This is also a good time of year to check the lake for unusual gulls like Iceland, Lesser Black-backed, Bonaparte’s, and Glaucous. Last year we had Lesser Black-backed and Bonaparte’s quite early in January. However none of those are sure things in any given year.

Update: I was wrong about all the easy birds being found for the month. Doug Gochfeld found two more species in Prospect Park on January 4, Merlin and Brown Creeper. Now that I think of Merlin, American Kestrel is also a real possibility. I had that in February last year.

I rolled out of bed about 6:00 this morning with plans to get to the park bright and early and grab as many year first birds as I could. However, Shayna, our Maltese, had other ideas; but after a quick walk with her, I still managed to get started at the North end of the park about 7:45.

The Vale of Cashmere produced the first good bird of the day: a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. This was almost immediately followed bya Fox Sparrow. Several White-throated Sparrows, and a couple of Northern Cardinals. Then, walking back to the Rose Garden, I relocated a Hermit Thrush I’d spotted several times in the last month. I’m not sure why, but there seem to be a lot of late Hermit Thrushes hanging around New York City this winter.
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My goal for 2006 is to finally add all the regular New York City species to my life list. They’re a few that reliably show up here, but I just haven’t gotten yet. In decreasing order of probability they include:

• Purple Sandpiper. This one’s regularly seen at various locations along the New York City shoreline, including here in Brooklyn. I’ve looked for it a few times. I just haven’t gotten lucky yet.
• Common Nighthawk. These are reliably seen during for a couple of weeks migration in Central Park. Of course I went out the first night they didn’t show up. This year I’ll go sooner. They also show up in Prospect Park, but not as reliably.
• Eastern Screech Owl. At least two roost in Central Park. Officially those are released birds and not “countable”, but I’d still like to see them.

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Nisus Writer 3.0 introduced discontiguous selection fifteen years ago. This is an unbelievably useful feature, but sadly still uncommon in most products. In recent years Microsoft Word finally caught up. However, the feature has been little advertised, and it’s easy to miss.

To make a discontiguous selection in Word 2002 and later on Windows, hold down the control key when dragging for the second and subsequent parts of the selection. On Mac Word X and later use the Command key instead.

You can now cut, copy, paste, apply styles to, spell check, word count, or otherwise operate on what you’ve selected.

There’s no such thing as a Red-breasted Sparrow. There is, however, a female Eastern Towhee, which when you see it for the first time looks like nothing so much as a Red-Breasted Sparrow. However, if you look in your field guide for “Red-Breasted Sparrow” you won’t find it. If you keep looking a few pages past the sparrows, you’ll normally find the towhees though. But even that may not be enough.

To make matters even more confusing for the novice, the female Eastern Towhee does not in fact have a red breast. It has red flanks. However when you see it in the field, it’s often foraging on the ground so the breast is hidden. Consequently it ends up looking like a cross between an American Robin and a sparrow. Furthermore, the male Eastern Towhee doesn’t really look like a red-breasted sparrow at all, and some of the more basic field guides only show the male. So if you didn’t find Eastern Towhee in your field guide, or didn’t make the connection between the one in the book and the one in the field, you can now Google for “red-breasted sparrow” and find this page. How cool is that?

Geneva’s not a large city or a hard city to get around in. You can reproduce most of this route simply by walking down to the lake, and then walking along either side, with side trips off into the various parks that line the lake. If you want to go a little further afield, the book to read is Les Bons Coins ornithologiques de Suisse Romande by the Groupe des Jeunes de Nos Oiseaux (Our Birds Youth Group). It provides detailed descriptions (in French) of over 100 excellent birding spots in the Southern part of Switzerland. It should be available in most large bookstores in Francophone Switzerland. Several of the chapters are online including la Rade de Genève et Petit Lac, which describes most of the route I took here. Even if you read French fairly well, it might still be helpful to carry a French field guide to assist with the bird names (Nettes rousse, Fuligules milouinans, Garrots, Macreuses, Harle huppé, etc.)

For actual identification of European birds, I’m partial to the Collins Bird Guide by Killian Mullarney, Lars Svensson, Dan Zetterström, and Peter J. Grant. It covers a larger area than I’d like ideally. (It’s a little annoying to think you’ve identified a bird only to check the map and discover the one you think you’re looking at only lives in Siberia or Israel.) However the pictures and text are second to none. It’s been translated into several languages, with adaptations for the countries that speak those languages. For instance, the English translation calculates bird rarity based on how likely birds are to be found in the British Isles. For field use make sure you order the paperback vesion, not the larger hardback version (though the latter has prettier pictures, it’s much too big to carry around in the field.)

The original Swedish version is Fägelguiden Europas och Mederhavsaomradets fägler i fält. Versions are also available in French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and possibly other languages.