Hummingbird Garden
This November has been a warm one until recently! As mentioned yesterday, the month is typically known for its avian rarities in the Northeast with southerly flow events followed by strong cold fronts, moving those that traveled up on those winds back down to coastal areas especially. Cave Swallows are a featured species in this phenomenon, with some more still being seen around the Great Lakes today and hundreds of others transported back to the New England coast to presumably move south again. Hummingbirds are also being seen more frequently in late autumn and early winter across the...
Read MoreCave Swallows
After an enthralling day with the biggest invasion of Franklin’s Gulls across the Northeast and Atlantic coast since at least 1998 (more on that in another entry later this weekend) our collective hopes were high for more sensational rare birds with them. This Friday, one of the most memorable birding days in years, had all available Connecticut birders mobilized along the coast, looking for life and state Franklin’s while trying to remember to watch for many other target species. One of these was the Cave Swallow, a classic November vagrant in the Northeast since the early...
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 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 MoreEurasian Wigeon (Anas penelope)
Can you identify the rarity in this photo? It is a distant record shot of five birds with the one in the upper right being of the most interest. There are four American Wigeons (Anas americana) and one Eurasian Wigeon (Anas penelope), the latter species being a rare but regular find in the United States. This was the cloudy scene on a small and otherwise unremarkable pond behind a high school in Connecticut earlier this week as the male Eurasian has been hanging out with this American group for a few weeks. All of the ducks were very busy feeding. You never know where unusual birds will...
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