Do you love your birds of summer? Enjoy them while they last; depending on where you live, they’ll be departing before you know it. Increase the pleasure of your special bird sightings by bragging about them here. Step right up and share your best bird of the weekend.
While I found the hunting Ospreys and soaring Brown Pelicans special indeed, the arrival of a flock of Sanderlings right where my son and I were enjoying some Atlantic Ocean excitement at Virginia Beach made them my best birds of the weekend. Charlie’s best birds were two Common Terns that flew over Conigre Mead, a stretch of quiet river miles inland… very odd indeed. Corey’s best was his life Sooty Shearwater off Shinnecock Inlet, although the Brown Pelican, Hudsonian Godwit, Least Bittern, Black Tern, Whimbrel, and Royal Terns were all pretty darn good too. Now if he could only figure out how to get his soul back from Daisy after doing all that birding…
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.
Sitting for ten minutes while a pair of New Zealand Scaup preened in the winter sun was nice (very calming), but top prize has to go to the Sacred Kingfisher (or Kotare) in the sun which gave me the best views I’ve ever got of the species (from above, as opposed to their butt as they sit on telephone wires).
Eurasian Blackbird – yes, the walks through the fields south of Leimen have come to an end. My son won’t sit still long enough in his stroller to make it to the fields, so we usually hit the next-best playground. The week-ends will be filled with pigeons, house sparrows and blackbirds from now on…
The alligator is gone from the small pond near here and a few birds actually were poking for food around the edges. This weekend there was a Little Egret, a Little Blue Heron and several white Ibis. I am hoping the alligator has found a permanent new home and more birds come back.
I also saw some Bluebirds in a friend’s garden.
American White Pelican @ Jamaica Bay (including one photo I got with the A train in the background)! ’nuff said.
My first Stilt Sandpiper of the fall. I fell in love with that bird before I’d even seen one, seduced by Arthur Singer’s absurdly candy-striped painting in the old Golden guide; when I finally saw one, I was amazed at how very different and how very much more beautiful they were, and when I lived in Nebraska they were a highlight of every spring (and now, wherever else I’ve lived on the continent, of every autumn).
I had 2 looks at a BLACK RAIL (at a distance of < 6 feet) in the ACE Basin of South Carolina to start the weekend. First Black Rail I have seen since summer 2008. A couple of companions and I heard 4 Black Rails calling simultaneously there this past Sunday and one of us, Bill Dobbins, got a quick glimpse of 1 Black Rail there right at daybreak. I have been hearing birds calling in this area the past few weeks.
Pretty tough to beat Black Rail but I had a pretty good weekend of guiding at Heliconias Lodge, Bijagua, Costa Rica. Best birds in their high quality foothill rainforests were the Tody Motmot (most accessible site in C.R. for this toy-like bird), Ocellated Antbird- glimpses at a good-sized antswarm, and Great Curassows uttering their low frequency, bovine-like calls from the dense understory. We had a good chance at getting Rufous-vented Ground Cuckoo with the ants but it was time for us to drive back to the city (as Charlie Brown would say, “aaugh!”).
I would have to say my best bird for the 4th weekend of July had to be the Red-Necked Stint in Squim, Washington. We arrived at the reported site around 9:00 am. Set up and started looking. There were about 500 birds in the area. I keyed in on a bright Western Sandpiper to begin with. But my buddy said no that’s not it. He then said check this bird out. We then asked a gentleman standing by if he knew that the bird looked like. Said yes he was the one who had found it a week before. So we let him look through the scope and he said that’s him. So we watched him for about 20 minutes until it spooked. #643 for the life list. Can’t pick up a much better bird to add or a more beautiful one.