Davie, Davidson and Rowan Counties and More Local Stuff (09-16Sep2023)

The County Year effort is definitely not making much progress but I did get a chance to knock out a few counties earlier this month when Luke and George had a Cross Country meet in Kernersville and then Luke wanted to visit Catawba College in Rowan County.  George needed to rack up some driving miles so he can eventually get his full driver's license so he tagged along and periodically scared the living daylights out of me with his driving.  The meet was a late night affair going until 10pm.  

Half way through George's heat, I saw that he was in 3rd place running a 5:28 pace for his 5k.  There was over 250 kids in his heat.  I couldn't believe it.  Luke has been the fastest runner in the family and he still is, but George is making huge improvements. As I waited near the finish line, I was floored, George was in  first place!  He won outright for Junior Varsity out of schools across all of North Carolina.  They even interviewed him for TV.

Luke did well but didn't place in the top 20.  Some of the kids in the top 10 were running blistering paces and they will be getting free rides to good colleges.

We stayed in Greensboro overnight and headed to Salisbury NC in the morning which oddly enough is where Catawba College is, not Catawba NC.  I was mildly excited because there is an eBird Hotspot on the college campus called the Catawba College Ecological Preserve. 

George and I started to walk the preserve trails while Luke met with the coach for Catawba. The trails were nice in some bottomland habitat with ponds and hard woods.  However, it was birdless and the mosquitoes were horrendous! I think we had 5-6 species of bird the whole time we were there which was over an hour.  And to add insult to injury it started to pour rain.

Northern Pearly-Eye - note the antennae are black with an orange tip.  Southern Pearly-Eyes have all orange clubs.

Some tidbits about Rowan County.....

The county seat is Salisbury which is not a huge town by any means, but it sits between Greensboro to the NE and Charlotte to the SW so its not totally out there.  I thought this Wiki entry on Rowan was interesting enough to include here.

"The first Europeans to enter what is now Rowan County were members of the Spanish expedition of Juan Pardo in 1567. They established a fort and a mission in the native village of Guatari, believed to be located near the Yadkin River and inhabited by the Wateree. At the time, the area was ruled by a female chief whom the Spaniards called Guatari Mico (Mico was the Wateree's term for chief). The Spaniards called the village Salamanca in honor of the city of Salamanca in western Spain, and established a mission, headed by a secular priest named Sebastián Montero.

This fort was one of six that Pardo's expedition established before he returned separately to Spain in 1568. Small garrisons were stationed at each fort. They were built into the interior, including across the mountains in what is now southeastern Tennessee. In 1568, Native Americans at each fort massacred all but one soldier in the garrisons. The Spanish never returned to this interior area in other colonizing attempts, instead concentrating their efforts in Spanish Florida."

So the natives here sent the Spaniards packing!

Rowan County is middling in size at 511 square miles and 137k people in it.  The one famous person I recognized from Rowan is Mike Evans, otherwise known as Lionel Jefferson from All in the Family and also the spinoff of The Jeffersons.  Apparently he also created and helped write episodes for Good Times.

There is Mike in the middle!  He was born in Salisbury which is the town the college is in.  The College sat a couple miles from the nicer part of town and had a stretch of unattractive strip malls in between town and the college.  However, those strip malls also had a nice place to eat!  

Yummi BahnMi!  So yummy!  

While Luke continued his tour of the college, George and I got into the car and decided to kill some time by driving to Davie Community Park in Davie County.  It was only about 20 minutes away.  It was not very birdy.... sorry folks, no real bird pics to share from that park.

But I did get some butterflies, like this presumed Sachem.

Another angle of same butterfly.

Hackberry Emperor!

Davie County is 86th out of 100 in NC for size at 264 square miles.  The population is about 41k people.  I couldn't find any famous people from Davie that I recognized except the Senator Ted Budd which is a current sitting senator and I remember his name well because I had to remember current senator names when I was sworn in for American citizenship.

After picking up Luke from Catawba College, I asked the boys if we could make one more stop on the way home....

Lake Thom-A-Lex Park in Davidson County was a surprisingly nice park northeast of Lexington, the county seat.  I took a nice walk down some of the forested trails bordering the lake, and again the birding was lame but the butterflies obliged.

Gemmed Satyr!

Caroline Satyr

A Robber Fly!

Blue-fronted Dancer!  The great thing about Dragonflies or Damselflies is that there are still a ton of lifers out there for me.  This thing was tiny and I had to take a zillion pics to get one in focus.

Davidson County is relatively large with 552 square miles and 163k people.  

Ok this guy isn't necessarily famous, but he was born in Davidson County and he has an unfortunate last name so I thought it was worth giving him 5 seconds of fame on my widely read blog.

John Robert Raper was born October 3, 1911 to William Franklin and Julia Salina (Crouse) Raper on a tobacco farm in Davidson County, just outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was the youngest of 8 children. He was called "Red" because of his hair color. His brother Kenneth was also a mycologist. Beyond mycology and genetics, Red loved music and was an avid trumpet player. He contributed to the Moravian community brass choirs around his childhood home and later to the North Carolina Symphony. He was noted for his talent as a photographer and artist, regularly illustrating his own and others scientific publications.

Good on ya John.  

The drive home went by super fast as I have taken up online chess and time flies when I am playing 10 minute chess games.

Here is a Potpourri of other birds from home later in the month.

Yellow Warblers are showing up in big numbers lately especially at Airlie Gardens.

Young Wood Ducks are dumb enough that they swim out in the open.

The warbler action has been picking up at Burnt Mill Creek as you can see from this Maggie.

Red-eyed Vireos are always the most abundant bird at BMC this time of year.

Veeries are never common in New Hanover County, but we usually get a few before migration is over.

Likewise with Cape May Warblers.

The next weekend we had yet another trip for Luke's Cross Country.  George didn't make the cut for this invitational. The race was at Wake Med Soccer Park in Cary, NC.  I had a little time to bird before and after his heat but it wasn't too birdy.

Swainson's Thrush was the best bird.

Fiery Skipper was the best Butterfly.

Unfortunately I didn't get to rack up any additional counties on that particular trip.

I am up to 58 counties which means I will most likely not finish 100 by the end of the year, but I don't regret the effort because I have visited some cool places I hadn't been to yet in NC.

Oregon Inlet Pelagics and other Stuff (26Aug - 02Sep2023)

Sorry for the radio silence folks, it's that time of year when the birds are flocking and the waves are pumping which makes it difficult to do anything but bird and surf.  That's not even accounting for my son's Cross Country meets and other life stuff.

So now I have a huge backlog of photos including 2 days of pelagics out of Oregon Inlet. So without further ado.....

The pelagic on Saturday the 26Aug was kind of ho hum from a rarity standpoint but I always enjoy spending my time on the ocean.

Red-necked Phalaropes on the way out to the gulf stream.

Great Shearwaters are much more common in the late summer than other times of the year.  They breed in the Tristan island group (Tristan da Cunha and Inaccessible Island) in the southern Atlantic which is basically halfway between Uruguay and South Africa.  Talk about out there!  How amazing are seabirds??!!

Audubon's Shearwaters are Sargassum specialists that feed on the critters that hang out and make their living in the floating weed.  The above one was photographed on the 26th, but the below one was on the 27th.

Here you can see one that caught a nice sized Sargassum Fish or some other critter.

Cory's Shearwater - hopefully this species will be split in eBird someday soon to include the Scopoli's sub-species as a separate species.  The Scopoli's sub-species breeds in the Mediterranean but then makes its living in the Atlantic.  I am not sure if this is a Scopoli's, it is easier to ID then in flight.

Band-rumped Storm-petrel - we only had a few of these over the course of two days.

Band-rumped SP

Usually this time of year we get a ton of Black-capped Petrels, but I think they like a good wind and we had relatively light winds.

Even the Wilson's SPs were in low numbers both days.

Loggerhead Turtle!  These are truly huge turtles!

Fairly early on the second day, we ran into a nice raft of shearwaters and other seabirds including....

South Polar Skuas

A Masked Booby!

Sooty Terns were abundant including these snazzy juvenile plumaged birds.

Scopoli's Shearwater - notice the white "finger tips" are extensive. The nominate sub-species has more dark feathering in the primary tips on the underside of the wing.

Here is one of the nominate sub-species typical of most Cory's Shearwaters. Note the dark primary tips.

One of the highlights of both days were the mammalian sightings. This Cuvier's Beaked Whale was a lifer for me, I think.  I previously had seen Gervais' Beaked Whales.  These are some cool cetaceans!  They dive deeper than any other whales.  They have been recorded diving up to 10,000 feet!  That's insane.

I guess you need a huge blow-hole when you dive so deep.  Not sure why the fins on the different whales I photographed look so different.  I think maybe this is an older male that has seen some wear and tear on his dorsal fin.

This young Bridled Tern was a beauty with all the cool scalloping on the upper wing.

A Sooty Tern offering a nice view of the white outer retrices (tail feathers).

Audubon's Shearwater with Sargassum Fish.

Sooty Tern

Later in the day we found why the Black-capped were not obliging us with great views, they were just sitting on the water.  Maybe they had a nice night of full moon fishing and were keen to just float in the low winds.

One of our last birds was this Trindade Petrel that flew in the distance and never really gave good looks.

Back home I tried birding a couple times, but it was still hot and slow.

Needham's Skimmer - when the birding is slow, go for the Odes (Dragonflies and Damselflies).

The weekend after the pelagic was also the weekend after Hurricane Idalia which left us relatively unscathed in Wilmington, but did end up giving us some storm birds.  This storm came up from off the coast of the Yucatan where huge colonies of American Flamingos live.  These colonies are known to get up and move to Cuba sometimes especially before or after storm events.  The prevailing theory is that a bunch of flamingos were relocating from the Yucatan to Cuba when they got caught in Idalia's winds.  Some folks have been able to read bands on the birds legs confirming they are from the Yucatan population.

Picture courtesy of ABA.org.

Flamingos were being found in Florida and as far afield as Ohio.  So Jeff Lewis of Dare County was smart and went looking for them at Pea Island and I am glad he did.  He found a flock of 11 at south pond on Pea Island.  Off I went, knowing that some storm birds don't stick around long.  I made the 5 hour drive only to find out the birds had flew! You can imagine my state of mind.  However, I collaborated with a group of other birders to look further afield and before long got a notification that they had been found out in the sound a good ways out from the Split Pea bridge.  

I got several different looks but they were far out and not conducive to photography.

Here are the 11 American Flamingos flying out over the sound near Split Pea.

Here is a picture I took in Cuba in 2017.

And one I took from the Yucatan in 2019.

Very cool.  As I write this, they are still out in the sound near Split Pea but most folks are getting long scope views.  It would be cool to bring a kayak out there and get some better looks without getting to close so as to not bother them.

I have one more post to write for some county birding I did last week, but I will save that for when I have some more material to add.