September is a classic shoulder season, not yet finished with what has passed but still subtly teasing what is to come. Change is good, particularly because it always brings new birds 😉
After one failed attempt after another, I finally added Ruddy Turnstone to Monroe County list after tracking them down to Ontario Beach. The reward for my long vigil was catching one still in its calico plumage. Corey spent his weekend camping in the wilds of the western Catskills. Though the late night Barred Owls were nice and the Bald Eagle hanging out on the lake was very pleasant, Corey most preferred when he came across a mixed flock of wood-warblers. Of those, the best was a Bay-breasted Warbler, which is Corey’s Best Bird of the Weekend.
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.
14 Cape May Warblers and 7 Tennessee Warblers all in just Sunday (along with a whole bunch of other warblers) in my little neighborhood of New Lebanon, NY. I am spoiled rotten by the birds around here right now.
We had our first Yellow Warbler of the season yesterday! Sort of grudgingly looking forward to fall-plumage warblers – mixed bag of great birds/warbler neck/evaluating rare bird reports with ambiguous descriptions.
Heere in Tacoma we are penned in by smokey conditions, making it unhealthy to get outside. Birding restricted to window watching. Fortunately I can see Commencement Bay, and the Caspian Terns circling in the smoke over the water was strangely intriguing. I took advantage of the time in the house to clip a segment of a recent podcast where my guest talked about the threat of wildfires to disturbed shrub-steppe habitat. It seemed pretty timely, so I posted it as a You Tube clip. See the link below.
Here on the Olympic Peninsula we are also indoors with the toxic air from smoke. The birds seem subdued, with fewer in the garden or at the feeder. I’m happy to see the Anna’s Hummingbirds have survived, the Spotted Towhees seem fine; and the best bird of the weekend is the Steller’s Jay. They rarely visit us, and just started coming to the suet at the end of August. First it was one jay, then there were two, and this weekend we saw four together. We hold our breath and run out to place peanuts on the deck railing for them.
Best for me was a distant year Galapagos Shearwater scoped from a busy beach at Puntarenas, Costa Rica.
Syrian Woodpecker