Do you get out birding much? If you’re checking in here on a Monday morning, chances are you have a bird tale to tell. Then again, maybe like me you simply enjoy hearing about the avian observations of others even when you can’t make time for your own bird chases. Speaking of Birdchasers, Rob Fergus may not be a medical doctor, but his prescribed 20 Bird Minimum Daily Requirement seems to be a sure cure for what ails most of us. Be honest: how often are you reaching that mark? 

I’ll admit that I rarely reach 20 bird species a day, especially this time of year. This weekend, however, I needed to take my mind off all those gaudy birds Corey was scoping down at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. Plus, the time was finally right for me to savor a local slice of that southern Snowy Owl invasion. Seth and I hit the Summerville pier on Lake Ontario to spy the bird who’s been hanging out for the last month or two. The bad news was that it had flown away right before we arrived, but the good news is that it hadn’t traveled far. Dive-bombing crows marked its perch on a low roof, which we could view after a bit of trouble. That magnificent predator was too distant for decent photos, so I snapped some of the Long-tailed Ducks on which the owl has been sustaining itself…

As for Corey, his Space Coast experience is yielding ABA birds and lifers in buckets. If pressed, he’ll acknowledge a Gray Kingbird found by Doug Gochfeld at Viera Wetlands — his fifth lifer and tenth ABA-area bird of his Florida trip — as his his Best Bird of the Weekend™ .

What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us in the comments section about the rarest, loveliest, or most fascinating bird you observed. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment.

Written by Mike
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.