Is it better, to paraphrase that ragged old aphorism, to have birded and dipped than never to have birded at all? What if you just don’t see anything special?
I didn’t go after any particular bird this weekend, which is good since I hardly saw any. The woods were quiet, so we focused on geocaching beneath the silent trees with only a single Hairy Woodpecker for company. Corey, on the other hand, pulled a Razorbill in Jones Inlet that gave decent looks but no photographic opportunities. Nice!
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.
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.
My best bird was a bird i didn’t see. I travelled 100 kilometers to check out a Hume’s Leaf-warbler that had been sighted near Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Upon my arrival at the location, I was told the bird had been calling until five minutes before I arrived. It remained utterly silent ever after, unfortunately. And you need a tiny leaf-warbler to call if you want to find it high up in the trees in the dismal grayness that is December in the Netherlands! It was a cold, lonesome homebound journey…
Difficult this time!
Rarest: last winter’s hybrid Carrion x Hooded Crow has returned to my stomping grounds south of Heidelberg / Germany.
Most beautiful: a Blue Tit very close outside my kitchen window – always a stunner.
Most memorable: watching four (invasive) Rose-ringed Parakeets at very close range at a neighbour’s feeder with my young son and seeing the fascination in his eyes.
I have absolutely no idea what my best bird of the weekend actually was, and neither does anybody else! Confused? See here:
http://neighborhoodnature.wordpress.com/oak-parks-mystery-hummingbird/
Whatever it was, it’s a lifer for me, since the only hummingbirds I’ve seen have been Ruby-throated. Can’t wait to find out what I can actually write in my list!
And the amazing hummer hosts have yet to post a feeder update this morning … so who knows, I may have been one of the last people to see it.
My best bird of the weekend was definitely the Falcated Duck at Colusa NWR north of Sacramento. The funny thing is that it wasn’t even a state bird because I had seen the Honey Lake bird that ended up being the first accepted record and helped establish the pattern of vagrancy for this species to accept two previous California records. Nonetheless, I was fantastic to see this bird because of all the cool ducks I’ve seen Falcated Duck is my favorite. I think it is a prettier bird than Baikal Teal or Wood Duck. There is just something about that purple and green iridescent head, the frosty gray back, and those lovely long tertials flopping over the wing that strike just the right chord for me.
brant geese in the front range of colorado, specifically chatfield state park
A very tardy Least Flycatcher in Essex Co., NJ.
25 Double-Crested Cormorants sitting on snags in the depleted Brazos River in Granbury, TX
Five Short-eared Owls hunting the fields in Superior Township, MI (near Plymouth)
A Snowy Owl (Tawas Point State Park, Michigan). I believe approximately 11 billion people in Michigan ticked a snowy and bragged about it before I finally got this one. Now to get the next monkey off my back…
I know it’s an introduced species and introduced species are bad but I liked seeing an Eastern Rosella. But the Paradise Shelducklings were the best really.
I certainly dipped on a few species but also connected with high quality stuff like Bare-necked Umbrellabird, Snowy Cotinga, and White-fronted Nunbird at the Veragua Rainforest in Costa Rica (the umbrellabird was the rarest, lovliest and the most fascinating).
http://birdingcraft.com/wordpress/2011/12/12/the-veragua-rainforest-christmas-count-part-one/
It might seem a little pedestrian to some, but I managed my first photos of a Pileated Woodpecker this weekend after spotting them half a dozen or more times throughout the year. This time, at least, we were lucky enough to be right in the middle of a trio of snags that he was moving back and forth between, so he offered up a couple photo opportunities.
That said, I missed out on the Boreal Chickadees that had been seen all week at a feeding station not too far from the Pileated’s home stand…