How was your weekend? Did the New Year bring you any good birds? Don’t be shy… tell us about your best bird!
My best bird of the weekend was a puffed-up, pink-billed Dark-eyed Junco in one of the English Yews in front of my dining room window. I missed my neighborhood snow birds! Corey’s best bird was a rather unexceptional Swamp Sparrow on the Queens County CBC. Charlie ushered 2010 in with the same birds he left behind in 2009 and refuses to play favorites.
What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us about the rarest, loveliest, or most fascinating bird you observed in the comments section. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, we invite you to include the 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.
It was a very unbirdy weekend at Wrenaissance™. I took a walk on Sunday and it was like the night before Christmas: “Not a creature was stirring, not even a [tit]mouse.”
Mike: ‘Refuses’? Just forgot again, weighed down by sinuses full of what looks like egg-yolk 🙂 But, for the record, it’ll be the pair of Nuthatches coming to my back garden feeders!
Easy-peasy – my first bramblings for a couple of years.
For me it was my life lesser black-backed gulls (15 of them) in a 1000+ gull flock at Falls Township Community Park in PA.
If you include New Year’s Day as part of the weekend, then my best was an Iceland Gull on my local patch.
Walking-up an – Aardwolf and – a pair of Violet-tipped Coursers on the cool, grey morning of January 2 at Ol Mesera tented camp. It’s in the Great Rift Valley, only 2 hrs from our home in Arusha. Ol Mesera is an inexpensive yet absolutely excellent place to stay, cheap by Tanzanian standards, fantastic wildlife, animals that you can walk amongst. It’s mentioned on my blog in quite a few places.
Went on a diving trip to the Poor Knights Islands, New Zealand’s premier diving location. I guess that would make the Buller’s Shearwaters my birds of the weekend, having seen those guys in California years ago it was nice to visit them at home (their only breeding colony is those small islands).
The Fairy Prions, Common Diving Petrels and Grey Ternlets were all very nice too.
My bird of the “weekend” was actually seen on Monday morning (Jan 4th). It was a banded Piping Plover in winter plumage at Fish Haul Creek Park on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
My best bird of the week was the Bare-Throated Tiger Heron…so cool!