How was your weekend? Any good birds? Tell us about your best bird.
My birding this weekend was pretty rotten. Seth and I hit Mendon Ponds for bitterns, which we had luck with last summer. This time, my best bird was Red-eyed Vireo, if that tells you anything.
My colleagues enjoyed much better birding. Corey and a veritable murder of bird bloggers invaded Jamaica Bay for superior shorebird sightings. Click through the American Avocet below to see the rest of the action:
Charlie, on the other hand, saw much rarer birders than birds at the 2009 British Birdwatching Fair. Read his brilliant account to glimpse just how action-packed even an afternoon at the world’s largest birding festival can be. Once he recovered from the excitement, Charlie followed that success by capturing a photo of a male Hobby over one of the fields by his house, his first sighting there and definitely his bird of the weekend.
What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us about the rarest, loveliest, or most interesting bird you observed in the comments section. Plus, if you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, I invite you to include the link in your comment.
This has to be the Sabine’s gull at Upton Warren. The best at the Birdfair was greenshank but back home in Redditch later a hobby treated me to aerial hunting.
Aside from some Greater White-Fronted Geese that I learned were “raised in captivity”, my most interesting bird this weekend was a female Bufflehead, which is very early for western South Dakota.
I didn’t find any Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, sadly, but a pair of Bachman’s Sparrows were a nice consolation.
My best bird, for me, would either be the Piping Plovers or Hudsonian Godwits. On that same trip, I got my 100th lifer (I am a young and aspiring birder).
If it makes you feel better, my best birds for the weekend were five young eastern bluebirds. They were tons of fun to watch and they were definitely watching me back, but my birding weekend was kind of ‘blah’ overall – it seems I live far enough north where migration has already taken it’s toll on the area. I read blogs of guys birding about 2 hours south of me and they are seeing all sorts of new findings and I have hit a dry spell!
I was also pleased with a surprise belted kingfisher. I crouched down at an inlet and sat watching for awhile. It was totally quiet so I scanned with my binoculars and spotted the kingfisher resting on the end of a dead log!
My best bird for the weekend was the Sora. A life bird AND giving uncharacteristically good looks AND a fascinating species AND aesthetically pleasing. That bird had it all.