Twitching the Redpoll

This was my first real North Carolina “twitch,” a birding trip with the sole purpose being to see a single anomalous state bird.

In this case it was an easy choice to go after it. Common Redpolls rarely show up in North Carolina and when they do, they don’t often stick around to be seen for very long. Here was one staked out at a bird feeder just 40 minutes west of Durham. Plus Robert Meehan needed a ride.

For etiquette reasons I only took horribly distant photos. To approach a rare bird like this will lead to it instantly flush into the nearest window at deadly speed, or alternatively into the maw of a feral cat or talons of a Sharp-shinned Hawk, robbing fellow twitchers of a potential lifer. So you'll need to use your imagination to its full potential!

Boy I really need to get myself a digi-scoping setup! Mark Kosiewski got some great shots through his scope the following day.

If you squint hard enough you can make out the stubby yellow bill and black chin.

I hope lots of people got to see this bird. It stuck around for a few days, but as far as I can tell it is now officially MIA.

My last pure “twitch” was for a Virginia’s Warbler that showed up 20 minutes outside Providence while I was at Brown some four years ago. It was the first state record and a lifer for me.

Common Redpoll was not a lifer for me. I saw my first redpolls on Stewart Island in New Zealand (of all places!) back in 2009. But it was my 299^th ABA tick and my 247^th NC tick, so I’m rapidly approaching milestones.

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I’ve miraculously survived the month of February in my bird-a-day challenge. But I’ve only got about 7 or 8 easy piedmont birds left, so I’ll probably kick the bucket just before or after Spring Break.

I really should have started one of these last year. My schedule was perfect to make it through 365 species: Three weeks of winter NC birds to start the year -> fly to South America in late January and tick nothing but lifers through early August -> return to NC to get summer residents in the piedmont and coast, then fall migrants through the end of October into November -> surviving through November and December would have been dicey as some winter residents would have been used up from the previous January.

Anywho, at least this way I’ll be setting a low bar to be bested repeatedly in years down the road. The list to date (birds in bold were life or state birds):

01/01/11	Red-breasted Nuthatch
01/02/11	Pine Siskin
1/3/2011	Barred Owl
1/4/2011	American Kestrel
1/5/2011	Ruby-crowned Kinglet
1/6/2011	Purple Finch
1/7/2011	Yellow Rail
1/8/2011	Lark Sparrow
1/9/2011	Piping Plover
1/10/2011	Red-throated Loon
1/11/2011	White-winged Scoter
1/12/2011	Red-tailed Hawk
1/13/2011	Cedar Waxwing
1/14/2011	Eastern Bluebird
1/15/2011	Black Vulture
1/16/2011	Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
1/17/2011	Brown Creeper
1/18/2011	Dark-eyed Junco
1/19/2011	Cooper's Hawk
1/20/2011	Song Sparrow
1/21/2011	House Finch
1/22/2011	Pine Warbler
1/23/2011	Eastern Phoebe
1/24/2011	Field Sparrow
1/25/2011	Hairy Woodpecker
1/26/2011	Canada Goose
1/27/2011	Pileated Woodpecker
1/28/2011	Yellow-rumped Warbler
1/29/2011	Short-eared Owl
1/30/2011	Blue Jay
1/31/2011	Fox Sparrow
2/1/2011	Red-headed Woodpecker
2/2/2011	Rock Pigeon
2/3/2011	Brown-headed Nuthatch
2/4/2011	American Crow
2/5/2011	Mourning Dove
2/6/2011	American Woodcock
2/7/2011	Ring-billed Gull
2/8/2011	Turkey Vulture
2/9/2011	Hermit Thrush
2/10/2011	Golden-crowned Kinglet
2/11/2011	American Robin
2/12/2011	Great Horned Owl
2/13/2011	White-crowned Sparrow
2/14/2011	Great Blue Heron
2/15/2011	European Starling
2/16/2011	American Goldfinch
2/17/2011	Downy Woodpecker
2/18/2011	Tundra Swan
2/19/2011	Dovekie
2/20/2011	Swainson's Hawk
2/21/2011	House Sparrow
2/22/2011	Brown Thrasher
2/23/2011	Eastern Towhee
2/24/2011	Killdeer
2/25/2011	Common Redpoll
2/26/2011	Fish Crow
2/27/2011	White-throated Sparrow
2/28/2011	Red-shouldered Hawk

My first trip to Hatteras

I tagged along with Jeff Pippen and 9 Nicnats (What's a Nicnat?) for my first ever trip to Cape Hatteras and my first North American pelagic birding trip.

We saw a Great Horned Owl fly across highway 64 around dusk on the ride down, which made the state list significance of my recent birding in Charlotte all the less.

So far so good.

Saturday morning we were up before dawn to meet Brian Patteson at the dock. We had tallied six gull species before even leaving the sound (the four you would expect plus Laughing and Lesser Black-backed). I knew our next gull would be a lifer for me.

I have a bad habit of whispering bird sightings rather than calling them out. And I mumbled to nobody in particular “hey check out this white gull…” Luckily Jeff was there to shout “ICELAND GULL!!!”

It turned out that there was really no need for urgency as there was almost always an Iceland Gull following the boat throughout the day and we saw four or five individuals.

Photographing a moving bird from a moving boat is not an art form I have perfected, so I took this video for those willing to brave the motion sickness.

Unfortunately there were no 8^th, 9^th, 10^th or 11^th gull species on the trip. We did see plenty of alcids including Razorbills (you’ll have to use your imagination) and Dovekies (you’ll have to imagine even harder as I didn’t get any pictures at all).

A steady wind kept us from getting out to the gulf stream, which was a real bummer. We missed a lot of reliable pelagic species: no Red Phalarope, Great Skua or shearwaters of any kind.

I did get three lifers out of the bargain (both alcids and the white gull), and I got to see my first breaching humpback whale (!), so I really can’t complain. I sure left myself with plenty of reasons to return for another voyage.

Sunday we started out birding Cape Point hoping for Western Grebes, rare gulls and Snow Buntings. Despite some generous help from Neal and his four-wheel drive vehicle we struck out on those targets. I later heard that others had found the Snow Buntings as well as Black-headed and Glaucous Gulls...so add those to my list of potential life and state birds missed on the trip. A consolation was a lone female Common Goldeneye at the pond which was NC bird #247 for me.

We birded our way up the banks through several spots over the next few hours seeing all sorts of ducks and shorebirds including a few dozen American Avocets at the Bodie Lighthouse pond. We also got some great looks at a cooperative Merlin in South Bodie.

No crazy rail sightings though. It seems like everybody has a ridiculous rail story for that spot.

We ended the day and our trip at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which I had driven past several times but never visited. What a place!

Jeff Pippen was able to pick out a distant circling adult Swainson’s Hawk, which I was able to view for several minutes through my scope. Life bird #1458 (thanks Jeff!).

Jeff pretended to get lost on the network of gravel roads when he was really just setting us up for a dusk sighting of a Bobcat! No pictures unfortunately, but this was my first ever sighting of a non-captive non-domestic real wild cat.

On the whole it was a really fun trip. When the birding was slow, the group was there to pick up the slack. I’m already looking forward to next year!

Special thanks to Neal Moore for shuttling us all around Cape Point Sunday am, to Paul Chad for assisting Nicnats with funding and to Jeff Pippen for being a badass trip leader.

Recent winter birding in NC

Unfortunately this post is full of misses...

I went on a day trip down to the Pocosin Lakes region with NicNats and struck out on all my targets: we couldn’t find the Snow Goose flock to look for Ross’, I couldn’t convince Will to take us on a detour to Alligator River to look for a Swainson’s Hawk, and all the wigeon I saw were stubbornly domestic.

We found a flock of about 50 rather tame White Ibises in a random yard.

Interesting all here were adults. Later at Mattamuskeet all we found were immatures in the ditches. There seemed to be some interesting age segregation patterns occurring.

Consolation prizes were a Horned Lark and a Short-eared Owl (both new NC birds for me).

I continued my dipping streak on a trip last weekend down to Charlotte in search of Rough-legged Hawks at the airport with Mark Kosiewski, Robert Meehan and Matt Daw.

I don’t know what kind of plane that is but it certainly isn’t the hawk we were after.

We went after Ross’ Goose, but despite being at the perfect spot, came up empty.

Consolation prizes were Horned Lark and a Great Horned Owl (sound familiar?)

Added insult to injury (or illness to insult?) I began developing cold symptoms and was completely unconscious for most of the driving. Meanwhile Matt got himself about 300 county ticks by making us twitch house sparrows in Home Depot parking lots after crossing each county border.

To break my streak of missed lifers I ventured out and saw what was probably my easiest remaining in-state opportunity.

Life bird # 1554: White-crowned Sparrow. (1552 and 1553 came from taxonomic splits of Winter and Eurasian Wrens and a couple South American Trogons).

I should add a fair few species to my list this weekend on the Hatteras pelagic trip. I hope the weather cooperates!

Reader reponses

My inflammatory goshawk post received a massive response and my blog has never seen so much traffic!

The consensus was, of course, that the bird on my picture is not a goshawk. That’s a relief! Interestingly though the crowd was pretty evenly split between Cooper’s and Red-shouldered. To be fair this is likely more of function of the poor/distant shot than any pervasive identification problems.

A big thanks to all for chipping in, especially to Mike Tove and Harry Legrand, for providing extensive identification tips and information about goshawk occurrence history in NC and behavior.

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While I’m on the topic of acknowledging reader participation…

I received seven replies from readers who have seen birds from my 2010 top ten(err… eleven) list. Thanks so much to all who responded!

The biggest surprise was that Harry Legrand (for once) didn’t win. He was eclipsed by Orange County’s Derb Carter, who saw an impressive 9 out of a possible 11. I promised a prize to the winner…more on that later.

Here are a few interesting notes on the responses:

Lists ranged from 2 to 9 with a high average of just over 5-and-a-half.

Banded Ground-Cuckoo was the only bird that nobody seems to have ticked and thus deserved its spot at #1.

Only David and Judy Smith have been lucky enough to make it to the Galapagos and see Flightless Cormorants.

Below is the list rearranged by the number of responses that included each species in its list:

#10 Toucan Barbet: 5 (plus one “heard-only”)

#9 Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan: 5

#5 Andean Condor: 5

#4 Giant Antpitta: 5

#3 Waved Albatross: 5

Honorable mention Wetland Petrel: 4

#8 Coppery-chested Jacamar: 3

#6 Long-wattled Umbrellabird: 3

#2 Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager: 2

#7 Flightless Cormorant: 1

#1 Banded Ground-Cuckoo: 0

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And finally on to Derb Carter’s prize…

Unfortunately I’m out of pairs of Swarovski binoculars, so hopefully this shout-out will suffice:

I happened to see Derb Carter quoted in an article published in The Independent on the OWASA logging issue. For those of you unfamiliar with the case, I’ll briefly and crudely summarize: the organization charged with stewardship of Orange County’s water supply has publicized a plan to log portions of the Cane Creek Reservoir watershed and use herbicide to prevent regrowth of undesirable plant species.

Obviously this was met with some pretty fierce opposition from local residents including Derb Carter who was quoted as saying: “Overmature forests...This is purely an economical term and it has no basis in science or ecology at all," Carter said. "What we have here is a plan that's driven on the lowest priority — money.

What I like even better is this quote from some guy named “James,” who has a similar opinion and puts it a bit more bluntly on his blog: “[Derb Carter] is cautious and circumspect in every way. When he says something is stupid, you can be confident that he's right. What OWASA is proposing to do around the Cane Creek Reservoir is spectacularly stupid.”

OWASA is in the process of revising its plans, but there haven’t been any updates since December that I am aware of. If anybody hears any news on this topic or finds any other instance of Derb Carter standing up for the public good, please share them with me.

Goshawk hysteria

There have been a few recent reports of Northern Goshawks in the Carolinas holding varying degrees of credibility and attracting appropriate skepticism. These posts made me aware of a bird I had considered so rare as to never even consider when identifying hawks in North Carolina.

After looking at several dozen google images identified (correctly or incorrectly) as "goshawks," I couldn't help but see a resemblance to a hawk I saw just last week in Durham.

It was a long, but very distant look and as much as I wanted to wait for the bird to fly, I was out collecting data in Duke's SWAMP and had to move onto the next site.

The detail captured in the photo isn't really any worse than the binocular views. No tail pattern was visible. The bird never turned, flew or vocalized. The slight fork in the tail struck me as odd; I had never noticed this in any hawk before.

The eyebrow, vertical brown streaking and size all seemed consistent with Red-shouldered Hawk, a common species in this area and the obvious choice. But is there any chance I overlooked an immature goshawk right in my hometown? Is there anything in this photo that rules out one species or the other?

Yellow Rail!

The new year has scarcely begun and I have already seen what will almost certainly be in my top ten birds of 2011. Like a feathered mouse, the Yellow Rail is widely regarded as being one of the hardest to see breeding birds in the United States.

A few people have emailed me asking for details/advice on seeing this elusive bird. For their sake, I've written a quick narrative about our find:

Expectations were low (and that always helps). After spending a couple hours sorting through Chipping Sparrows looking for an "easy" Lark Sparrow at the nearby North River Golf Course, Jacob Socolar, Robert and James Meehan and I were struggling to stay dry while fording a small tidal creek at North River Marsh.


Wet and mud-splattered, we proceeded to tie ropes anchored with water-filled juice bottles around our ankles. Thus manacled like convicts we combed through a vast Spartina prairie which Jacob assured us was John Fussell's most reliable spot for Yellow Rails.

After about two hours puzzling over fleeting glances of ammodramus sparrows and marsh wrens and the occasional misstep into a deep hollow hidden by Needle Rush or a patch of quick mud we were cold and filthy and nearly ready to admit defeat. Suddenly a small yellow-and-brown streaked bird popped up from near our rope. It fluttered away from us for about three seconds showing obvious white patches in its wings before settling back down and vanishing some 60 feet ahead.

I recorded our unsuccessful attempt to flush it again.

No, you won't see the bird in this clip, but it does show our setup and the sort of habitat in which we found it.

The sighting left us ecstatic and we were hardly bothered when we again were unable to find the Lark Sparrow. We finished our day at Fort Macon State Park where we found a few Common Eiders near the rock jetty.

Jacob, Robert and Jimmy had to drive back to Durham that night, but I stuck around Emerald Isle for the weekend. It would be a longer and birdier stay than I had planned!

The next day I went back to the golf course and found the Lark Sparrow almost immediately in the exact location we had spent hours searching the previous day.

That's birding for you I guess.

I spent the afternoon birding Harker's Island where the best bird was probably a wooden decoy of a Long-tailed Duck I found inside the museum.

On Sunday I braved the frigid temperature and kayaked out to the Rachel Carson Estuarine Reserve, a shorebird paradise across a channel from Beaufort.

It was swarmed with Dunlin, Oystercatchers, Willets, Marbled Godwits and Short-billed Dowitchers.

Here's a dowitcher foraging in the classic "sewing-machine" style.

Bird highlights of the trip were Red Knot

and Piping Plover.

The next morning I woke up to blizzard conditions. I had never even seen snow at the beach before and I was staring out into a white-out at Emerald Isle!

The icy roads made my long weekend even longer. Madness!

The weather did turn the ocean into a lake, which made for excellent sea-watching conditions when visibility wasn't diminished by precipitation.
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I received a lot of responses to my last post about my top ten birds of 2010. I'll go over those next post.

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So far I have come up with 5 target birds for 2011:

1. Golden Eagle (if I were going to the neotropics this year I would replace "Golden" with "Harpy")
2. Black Rail (the Yellow Rail has me foolishly optimistic)
3. Gryphon Vulture (I missed this 4 years ago in Crete, hoping to see one in Croatia)
4. Roller
5. Eurasian Bee-eater

Help me add more!

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Ali inspired me to try this bird-a-day silliness. It will be fun while it lasts, but I see no chance of making it past February.

Birds so far:

01/01/11	Red-breasted Nuthatch
01/02/11	Pine Siskin
01/03/11	Barred Owl
01/04/11	American Kestrel
01/05/11	Ruby-crowned Kinglet
01/06/11	Purple Finch
01/07/11	Yellow Rail
01/08/11	Lark Sparrow
01/09/11	Piping Plover
01/10/11	Red-throated Loon
01/11/11	White-winged Scoter
01/12/11	Red-tailed Hawk
01/13/11	Cedar Waxwing
01/14/11	Eastern Bluebird
01/15/11	Black Vulture
01/16/11	Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Top 10 birds of 2010

Perhaps this is a bit of a cliche...

...but I just have to savor 2010 as it was such a great year bird-wise. I saw 935 bird species 644 of which I had never seen before. I also published and sold out the first printing of my book, Birds of the Tyler Place, and I launched this blog.

Making a top 10 list...

...of any kind is always a tricky exercise; it can be so tough not to leave something out that deserves to be included. In this case I tried to pick my birds based primarily on their rarity, conservation status and toughness to find, and secondarily on just how awesome/cool/unique they are. So phenomenal birds like Andean Cock-of-the-rock and Scarlet Macaw didn't make the list. But there were also trade-offs the other way: I left off the endangered Galapagos Penguin because it so closely resembles several other penguin species and I couldn't include every endangered species from the Galapagos (there are far too many).

Not surprisingly all 10 (err... 11) were South American birds and all are listed as a conservation concern by the IUCN and amazingly for 8 of them I have photos.

Here's the challenge:

Have you seen any of the birds on this list? Let me know how many and the reader with the most will earn some sort of recognition (my money is on Harry Legrand). I bet nobody has seen them all!

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Hon. mention: Westland Petrel

So I failed at my own game and have listed 11 species. But I just have to include the Westland Petrel I saw on kolibri expeditions July 26th pelagic. Not only is this a vulnerable species, but it was also the first confirmed record of the bird for Lima, Peru (thanks to photos by Gunnar Engblom and some help from an expert).

I couldn't put it in the top ten because I had previously seen this bird in New Zealand in 2009 and it just isn't much of a looker compared to what else I've got here.

10. Toucan Barbet

Straddling the border between handsome and comical is the near-threatened and Choco endemic Toucan Barbet. The arrhythmic car horn group song was a commonly heard sound at higher more remote elevations of La Hesperia. I also saw these up close enjoying some bananas at the feeding station of Refugio Paz de las Aves.

While they can tolerate habitat fragmentation reasonably well, poaching for the pet trade has earned Toucan Barbet near-threatened status with the IUCN.

9. Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan

Seeing a toucan is always fun. I always get the impression that the heavy bill will tip the bird right off its perch. The Choco endemic and near-threatened Plate-billed Mountain-Toucan is special to me not only because of its limited range and conservation status, but because it is the only bird on this list that I found at La Hesperia Biological Station where I worked for six months. I found several noisy flocks with up to 8 birds around the summit of La Hesperia around 2100 meters elevation. This bird is also featured on the cover of Ridgley and Greenfield's Birds of Ecuador.

8. Coppery-chested Jacamar

A gorgeous bird in an awesome family is the vulnerable Coppery-chested Jacamar. I was able to see several jacamars this year, but the Coppery-chested is by far the most sought-after as its numbers are declining with habitat destruction. Bird Life International estimates that only 2,310-3,780 individuals remain.
I was fortunate to find a pair in the Bombascuro section of Parque Nacional Podocarpus in Ecuador. I had always thought of jacamars as butterfly specialists, but these two were adeptly decimating wasps. It made me wish for a better camera and better light.

7. Flightless Cormorant

Along with Darwin's Finches, the endangered Flightless Cormorant is a classic case study in natural selection at the birthplace of the theory of evolution, the Galapagos Islands. In the absence of land predators, the ability to fly no longer conferred any selective advantage for the fish-eating birds.

While snorkling off Isabella Island I had a pair of exuberant (and probably enamored) quacking Flightless Cormorants paddle straight into my mask!

The population fluctuates with El Nino cycles between about 400 and roughly 1800 mature individuals (Bird Life International).

6. Long-wattled Umbrellabird

The vulnerable and Choco endemic Long-Wattled Umbrellabird is one of the funniest-looking birds out there and I'm really sorry I never got a picture (images here). The one immature bird I saw up close seemed very curious about people. Unfortunately, this characteristic has made the species highly susceptible to hunting pressure and Jatun Sacha Bilsa in western Ecuador is one of the few places where they can be reliably seen.

I would love to see a group of lekking males, and if I had, then this bird would probably be up a couple spots in my top ten.

5. Andean Condor

The near-threatened Andean Condor is so famous it hardly needs any introduction. It is the national bird of Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Colombia. Ironically, it is nearly extirpated from Colombia, and Ecuador, where only about 65 individuals are estimated to remain (Bird Life International), is not far behind.
Incredibly, I saw three condors in Ecuador (or about 5% of the wild population!). The first was just after descending from the summit of Cotopaxi (yeah, that was an epic day) and the other two were in Parque Nacional Cajas near Cuenca.

4. Giant Antpitta
Like everybody else who has seen the Choco endemic and vulnerable Giant Antpitta, mine was the famous "Maria" of Refugio Paz de las Aves in Ecuador. It was the first antpitta I had ever laid eyes after being teased so thoroughly by singing but invisible antpittas elsewhere. Bird Life International estimates only 970-2,173 individuals remain.

3. Waved Albatross
Nearly all nesting of the critically endangered Waved Albatross is confined to Espanola Island in the Galapagos. I was fortunate to be there at the right time of year to see pairs "dancing" and adults incubating eggs. Seeing an albatross is always a thrill, especially for somebody who grew up on the albatross-less east coast of the US. But to see an endangered species up close going through nesting and courtship behaviors was absolutely priceless!

2. Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager



The endangered, Peru-endemic and beautiful Golden-backed Mountain-Tanager can only be found at essentially one remote location high in the elfin forest of Bosque Unchog in the Huanuco province of Peru. I found a flock of four here with the original guide, Reyes Rivera, who back in the 1970s had showed the bird to an ornithological expedition from LSU leading to its "discovery." Despite the finding, habitat degradation has continued and the population is estimated at 250 to 2500 individuals by Bird Life International.

1. Banded Ground-Cuckoo

Exceptionally rare, endangered and nearly impossible to see, the Choco endemic Banded Ground-Cuckoo is probably the only bird on this list I would NOT trade for seeing a Harpy Eagle (my biggest miss of 2010). It is opportunistically hunted for food and its habitat is rapidly disappearing to make way for African Oil Palm plantations. There are only 3 or 4 protected areas where it is known to occur. Bird Life International estimates a wild population of only 468-1,870 individuals.

I saw mine at Jatun Sacha Bilsa in western Ecuador where the first Banded Ground-Cuckoo was netted, tracked and filmed during nesting. For a great story about some hard-core birders twitching it at another location, see this account by Sam Woods. Images here.

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Well, that's about as much congratulating myself as I can handle. Next time I reckon I should lay out a top ten wanted birds list for 2011. I will need some help though as I will be in the Greek Isles and the Western Balkans in late May and have no idea what's out there. If you have birded that part of the world or know somebody who has, then please let me know!