Gray Ghost
The past week yielded a very large push of migrant Northern Harriers throughout the Northeast, with a sizable percentage of these birds being gray ghosts – adult males – like this one. The strong north and northwest winds following this current cold front should help many more migrants come through our area in the next few days. Will there be more southern and western November rarities with them? Probably, so keep an eye out for everything from the Swainson’s Hawk to the Townsend’s Warbler. Don’t forget we are only a couple weeks away from December 1 and the...
Read MoreAsh-throated Flycatcher
Early this morning Tina Green and AJ Hand reported an Ash-throated Flycatcher (Myiarchus cinerascens) at Sherwood Island State Park in Westport, Connecticut, the sixth record for the species in the state. I was able to run over and join our friends to watch this awesome, hungry and active bird as it flew from tree to tree while feeding in lovely sunny, calm weather. Here are some record shots… Birds like this come to us via the same mechanism as those Cave Swallows, as so many November rarities do – steady southerly flow pushing birds through the continental U.S. followed by...
Read MoreDickcissel (Spiza americana)
The highlight of my Sunday birding was this Dickcissel (Spiza americana). My friend, and terrific birder, Tom Murray and I had crippling views of this bird after we spotted it simultaneously among so very many sparrow migrants. It hid on us for about 20 minutes after we first got a quick glance for the initial identification, eventually granting prolonged looks. Persistence pays off! Patience (and sometimes a lot of silence instead of pishing) often helps when you want to a better look a specific individual. This bird of the prairies and grasslands of the Central and Midwestern United States...
Read MoreParasitic Jaeger
Here are a couple greats photos of a Parasitic Jaeger (Stercorarius parasiticus) via our friend, superb birder and expert naturalist Frank Mantlik as seen from Stratford Point a couple of weeks ago. Long Island Sound has been alive with everything from humpback whale sightings to various uncommon or rare fish, turtles and birds. This Parasitic Jaeger looks like an intermediate morph juvenile, and you can see it chasing a juvenile Laughing Gull in one of the photos. We observed this behavior from at least a few individual Parasitic Jaegers over several days during feeding frenzies involving...
Read MoreRarities on the Wing
I took this screenshot late this morning via this always helpful and very cool wind map. They use surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database, updated hourly, to create this national flow of air. Even without it in motion you can see there is a huge trough in the east, with winds shooting down from the northwest until you get to about Chicago, at which point the bend brings them screaming out of the south and then the east higher into New England. All of this unsettled weather can easily push avian migrants out of their chosen path, bringing southern resident rarities up to...
Read More
