A beautiful weekend for watching birds demands beautiful people watching birds. Were you out there?
I enjoyed a nice selection of sparrows and raptors in Pennsylvania farm country, with a pair of bold and noisy Red-shouldered Hawks taking the prize. Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend was one of the 76 the Queens County Bird Club recorded during the Big Sit on Saturday at the hawk watch platform at Fort Tilden. The bird was a Dickcissel and it was identified by voice as it flew over. Not bad!
How about you? 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.
Not a bird but the sighting of a huge male Wild Boar in broad daylight in the forests above Heidelberg/Germany. My first daylight observation since around 2006…
No Big Sit for me because I was guiding a trip in southeastern Costa Rica. No luck with any super rare migrants but always great birding there at this time of year anyways- thousands of migrating raptors, hundreds of Red-eyed Vireos, and various other migrants. This will sound strange but beating out Collared Forest-Falcon, two puffbird species, antbirds, and 150 other species was probably Least Flycatcher- my first for the year and a rare migrant here. Almost at 650 for the year.
Best bird of the weekend was probably seeing a male, and later a female, American Kestrel sprinting past an otherwise slow day at Hawk Mountain in Kempton, PA.
But best overall birding experience was without a doubt finally visiting Alexander Wilson’s grave, thanks to the BirdPhilly/Delaware Valley Ornithological Club’s superfun birdwalk!
Birded my patch all weekend (we had a long weekend off school, yay!) and was rewarded with two lifers- Wilson’s Warbler and locally rare Clay-colored Sparrow!