It's been kind of a slow month for birds, mainly because of my work schedule which has been hectic and then a wedding in New York.
Earlier this month, I headed to Ashley High School which is one of the best hotspots around near my house. Plenty of different habitats including fields and ponds.
This Merlin was unusually tame allowing me to play with camera settings to compensate for backlighting.
The Gadwalls on the pond are looking fresh and crisp.
American Black Ducks too.
There is a ton of hybridization happening between Black ducks, Mallards and Mottled so its always good to get a flight shot. No white border on the blue speculum confirms Black Duck.
I agreed to participate in the Dare County Rarity Roundup and was assigned Alligator National Wildlife Refuge which is probably more exciting in the winter. I did it with Matt W and we tried hard to turn up some rarities but the only thing that flagged on eBird as rare was a Lincoln's Sparrow which evaded my camera.
Orange-crowned Warbler - No one else really turned up anything to write home about so I wasn't too sore about it.
A Phoebe with no tail looked like a Manikin or something more exotic.
We saw a bunch of Cottonmouths including this beautiful red one.
This one looked like it was run over and was doing a series of death rolls, but I stayed well away just in case. There was a ton of traffic of people driving the roads around Alligator looking for bears. We did see a few of them.
For Thanksgiving I headed to New York for my brother's wedding which was nice but the camera stayed in my bag and I never really went birding.
This morning I was checking the Carolina Bird Club website and saw that a Greater White-Fronted Goose was hanging out at Ashley HS Fields and Ponds so I went down to get a county lifer.
Greater White-fronted Goose
Here you can see why the colloquial name is Specklebelly.
It moved around quite a bit but never went far.
Someone has found a Broad-tailed Hummingbird near Charlotte so I may head up there next weekend. Until then!
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