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.
I was most pleased by the Ospreys and Great Black-backed Gulls perched proudly on the awe-inspiring Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (once included among the Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World!) while driving home from a Virginia Beach vacation. Corey, curse his soul, overtook me once again in our ABA-list competition by bagging Black-bellied Whistling Duck at Jamaica Bay.
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.
Aaaah, finally I had a very decent weekend birding-wise. I went to visit my relatives on Saturday by train (200 kms south of Heidelberg) and had some exciting observations:
55 White Storks in a single flock – common birds in many parts of Germany, but the huge flocks one can see around the Mediterranean only form further south, and as far as I remember, this was my biggest flock ever in Germany.
4 Alpine Swifts while waiting to be picked up at the train station of Offenburg – extremely localized breeders in Germany and possibly my first Alpine Swifts of the new millenium – a millenium that’s not so new anymore.
More than 20 Bee-eaters in a nature conservation area with beautiful semi-arid meadows next to the Rhine, and [non-avian] thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Chalkhill Blues (a butterfly) on and over these meadows.
The best one?
Difficult to say, but I guess I was most pleased about re-connecting with Alpine Swifts.
Highly recommended.
Got a chance to swing by one of my favorite sites here in SW Ohio, a former Uranium enrichment plant now converted to a nature area. Excellent looks at Blue Grosbeaks and Grasshopper Sparrows.
Limpkin. Or was it the Hispaniolan Lizard Cuckoo? I just got back from a wonderful week in the Dominican Republic visiting my granddaughter and added 15 new birds to my life list: http://birdstack.com/people/thainamu/lists/6101.html
Henslow’s Sparrow, Curllsville, Pennsylvania, http://www.flickr.com/photos/queensgirl/4853302102/. Curllsville is part of the Piney Tract, an Important Bird Area of large reclaimed strip mines. The grasslands must be totally fantastic for birding sparrows in the spring. It was much quieter on Saturday, but I was fortunate to find this cutie. The Pennsylvania Society of Ornithology has an excellent site guide to birding the state on its website, thanks PSOA!
I went to McIntosh Lake in Longmont, CO on Saturday to see a juvenile Pacific Loon and at Walden Ponds in Boulder, saw a few Eastern Kingbirds. The loon has been there for a couple of weeks.
Least Grebes at southeast Arizona’s Pena Blanca Lake–pleasant consolation for being flooded out of California Gulch Saturday morning.
Didn’t find my Banded Dotterel, but 13 Royal Spoonbills were nice (quite a decent group for New Zealand). Seeing the breeding plumes on the White-faced Herons was nice too.