Summer Bird Count

This morning I joined Lee Schlesinger on his portion of the New Haven Summer Bird Count. His area covers most of Orange and a portion of Eisenhower Park in Milford. There were many highlights; may as well start with the most interesting bird.

One of our earlier stops was a small-ish cattail marsh along Meetinghouse Lane, where we had a bird giving a good Alder Flycatcher song at 7:15am. When we returned at 9:05am, the bird was giving the same dead-on Alder song. There was nothing abnormal or Willow-like about this bird's song. I'm thinking that this is probably a late migrant Alder. If it sticks around, I'll try to record and analyze its song...hopefully to confirm that it isn't a Willow singing an Alder-like variation.
Hopefully I'll have more to report on this bird...

Overall I think I added five birds to my Orange list, so I was thrilled. They were: Alder Fly, Willow Fly, Orchard Oriole, Brown Thrasher (multiple), and Green Heron (two). My birding so often takes me to the coast that I rarely bird my own "boring" town, especially in this hot and sticky weather. It was nice to have a reason to get out there.

When I left Lee in the early afternoon, he had tallied somewhere around 75 species for the day. He was going to do a bit more birding around town and elsewhere, so he had a chance to break 80 species for the area. Not too shabby.

NB

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