Mokka mit Schlag

Abita Amber packs a little more of a kick than I remembered, so yesterday after a beer and cheese fries lunch at Cooter Browns I decided to take a stroll around Audubon Park rather driving straight home. Lucky I did because I finally found five White-winged Doves flitting around in one of the Live Oaks near the Audubon Institute.

I’d been looking for these repeatedly in the Uptown streets without any success, despite fairly precise directions as to where they were likely to be found. This is probably the last life bird I’ll pick up this trip and likely this year, unless something really weird shows up in Prospect Park this weekend.
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Yesterday I took a very brief jaunt to Audubon Park where I was informed Black-bellied Whisting Ducks could be easily found. I didn’t find the 1000+ flock I was promised (Maybe they’d flown off to feed somewhere else, or I didn’t hit the right pond?) but I did find these seven:

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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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