Shorebirder

I’m recently back from two weeks in Japan with Julian Hough and Dave Provencher. We had a blast and saw heaps of great stuff. Over the next several weeks I hope to roll out at few posts related to that trip…some ID stuff, and some basic trip report stuff. Fixing the formatting on this blog is also something I'd like to get around to. One of the locally scarce birds we were lucky to see in Japan was this Northern Shrike on Hokkaido. In speaking with an experienced local, they are just about annual. We had two encounters with the bird. On our second visit we were able to secure photos, including a couple of in-flight shots. These are heavily cropped and unedited. The Holarctic “northern gray shrikes” underwent a bit of a taxonomic shakeup in 2017. Per the AOS, they were split into Northern Shrike and Great Grey Shrike. But the line drawn was not a clean North American versus Eurasian split as one might have assumed it would be. Rather, the East Asian form(s...

Happy New Year, all. Yesterday morning I finally had a chance to look for local SNOWY OWLS...probably the last birder in the state to do so, as this winter's significant southward movement of this species hit the region a full month ago. Sightings have been consistent since then, so apparently several birds have settled into prime locations for the winter. One of these locations is Long Beach in Stratford, CT, which is consistently a top spot to find Snowy Owls in the state. The adjacent saltmarsh & vicinity likely holds enough food to support multiple owls, whether they're after rodents or waterfowl. It didn't take long to spot two of them (there have been 3-4 individuals reported here recently) - dark young females roosting in the marsh separated by fifty yards or so. That was a bit too close for one of the owls, which decided to chase the other one off. Both birds eventually settled separately in the marsh and did not seem in a hurry to move anywhere f...

For anyone likely to spend any time at all birding in Connecticut, Frank Gallo's upcoming book will be a must-own. I've seen the layout and a few of the chapters myself, and it looks fantastic. click for larger image Available on Amazon for preorder, and it will certainly be selling in local shops come May 1st! - NB

After an unseasonably warm and unbirdy October, the first week of November has seen a bit of a return to normalcy. A short-lived cold front over the weekend delivered a nice hawk flight at Lighthouse Point in New Haven, CT, where we tallied three migrating SHORT-EARED OWLS, an impressive number for sure. record shot of one of the day's Short-eared Owls "Rarity Month" is also off to a banging start regionally with this chase-able CORN CRAKE on Long Island...wow. Corn Crake The rest of the year will likely be quiet in this space, as work, travel, and the holidays will keep blogging on the back-burner for a bit. I'll have much more to report after the holidays, though, as three weeks in Australia and two in Japan will deserve some attention :)  - NB

...just waiting for a cold front, thanks.

For you pelagic enthusiasts, the Brookline Bird Club (Massachusetts) has scheduled an overnight pelagic to the canyons southeast of Cape Cod for the weekend of October 14-15. This is in response to both the Aug and Sep overnighters being weathered-out. Deep-water pelagics have never been run to these ridiculously productive waters in October, which is part of what makes the opportunity so exciting. Our route usually takes us over the Nantucket Shoals twice, on our way to and from our main birding area: the edge of the continental shelf. This is potentially a super exciting time to be out there. We have a shot at (I won't use the word "expect," because you never know with birding...) 5+ species of shearwater, Northern Fulmar, multiple storm-petrel species, a solid jaeger migration, both skuas, and many more. This is a great time of year for Red Phalarope, Sabine's Gull, and Black-legged Kittiwake. Northern Gannets will be on the return south. Alcids are certainly ...

Aug 20: Our hope on this day was to visit South Monomoy Island, a legendary autumn birding locale situated at the very tip of the "elbow" of Cape Cod. Despite the island's stellar reputation, well-deserved thanks to a long list of vagrants and numbers of migrant passerines, you pretty much never hear anything about it these days. That's simply because the island is difficult to access; it is only reachable by boat. If you take a look at its position on the map above, you can see why it must be an amazing place right after an autumn cold front. We would be visiting in mid-August, with no such frontal boundary nearby, so we were not expecting a landbird migration. However South Monomoy can also produce shorebirds, terns, and long-legged waders, and this was a fine time of year for those. We launched the boat out of Harwich and made our way to the public landing area of this portion of Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge. Our hike took us first to the lighthouse,...