New Hanover Stuff, a Broad-tailed Hummingbird and Anson County (30Nov-03Dec2023)

Things are busy lately!  Work is gangbusters due to end of the year activities and I have taken on a surveying gig at the south end of Figure Eight Island a few days a week for a dredging operation.  So I have had very little time for continuing my county effort.

This Piping Plover on the south end of Figure Eight Island has been present at every survey I have done so far.  I googled "Piping Plover V92" and found the following:

"It was banded as a pre-fledged chick at Fire Island National Seashore, NY on 7/2/2021. It's been seen at Wrightsville Beach, NC every winter since, and back in NY in the breeding seasons."

The gull numbers have been truly amazing but so far I have not turned up anything rare. Lesser Black-backed Gulls are getting more and more common every year at Mason Inlet. The Black Skimmer flock is still around numbering over 400. I suspect they will leave soon. However, I love waking up and watching the sunrise....

No filters on this iPhone pic.

On my one day off I made a run to Union County near Charlotte to check out the continuing Broad-tailed Hummingbird which is only the state's second record. It didn't take long to show up. I set up my 800mm lens with 2x extender to play around. I knew the quality would be impacted by the lens length and fixed aperture (F11) but I was curious on how it would perform with a tripod mount.

Not a bad shot although I wasn't able to free the wings. This is a full frame shot with no cropping.

Here you can see how the tail extends well beyond the wing tips which is a key field mark for this species of Selasphorus which includes Rufous and Anna's.

These pictures are back to my 100-500 lens.

So cool that the lady who owns the house in this suburban neighborhood has allowed so many people to come and see this little gem.

The weather was supposed to rain all day so I was really please that it held off. Initially I was just going to go home but since the rain held off, I decided to stop at Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge for a brief visit. Pee Dee sits in Anson County which is a new county for my year effort, but more importantly its one of the only NWRs in NC I have not visited. I came in from the west side and kicked around the visitor's center and adjacent pond. As is typical with NWRs, it was not very birdy, but I enjoyed the trails and solitude. I only saw one other car and it was super quiet.

Eastern Phoebe

I picked up the usual winter birds like Winter Wren, Fox Sparrow and Hermit Thrush but the photography was bad with horrible light so I will spare you.

Anson County is 531 square miles which makes it one of the bigger counties, but it only has about 23k people in it which makes it one of the less populous counties. It is bisected by route 74 which is becoming an interstate corridor that connects Wilmington to Charlotte and beyond.

Anson has has several famous sports stars, but I was more interested in someone called Juanita Moody, which was a cryptographer with the NSA during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Take a read you are interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juanita_Moody

My overall impression of Pee Dee was that it could use a face lift.  Many of the boardwalks were roped off for "maintenance" but in actuality I didn't see any evidence of any kind of maintenance.  It looks like it could use a cash infusion or maybe a new superintendent with some motivation.  

On the way home, Sam C texted me that a Sandhill Crane was sitting in a field in northern New Hanover County.  I don't have one for the county so I was excited, but knew I would not make it home in time before dark so it would have to wait until Sunday.

Sunday Morning started with the count at Figure Eight.  The rain miraculously held off and I finished the count and headed to the Sandhill stakeout.

Bingo!  It was still there and as a bonus I saw Shun E who I have not seen in forever so it was nice to catch up with him.

Any time I can get a NC lifer (Broad-tailed Hummer) and a County lifer (Sandhill Crane) in a two day period is a good time for me.

So with the addition of Anson County, I am up to 67 counties for the year.  Clearly I am not going to make 100 but it has been a ton of fun and I will continue into the new year until I have completed the mission.

Dare County Rarity Roundup and a Goose (11-26Nov2023)

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!

A Day in Belgium (05Nov2023)

Last week I had a work trip in Belgium, and although I was there a whole week, I only had one day to go birding.  My work started on a Monday and so when planning the trip, I knew there was no way I could function leaving the night before and working the day after a red-eye flight.  So I decided to leave Saturday night and land early Sunday morning in Brussels.  This allowed me one day of stumbling around completely sleep deprived, looking for some birds in the typically bad Belgium weather. 

The hotel my team was staying at for work was in Rixensart at Martin's Chateau du Lac.

This was only about 30 minutes from Brussels on the border of Flanders and Wallonia regions which are dutch and french respectively.  Belgium is kind of a weird country in that the national languages are somewhat evenly split and it seems many of the French speakers don't speak Dutch and vice versa.  I suppose you get that to a certain extent in Canada, but in Belgium it seems to happen fluidly in a much smaller area.  My cab driver got me to the hotel by around 9:30 am so I basically had all day to find some birds.

Chateau du Lac - there was a nice trail all away around the lake adjacent to the hotel, so naturally that is where I started my walk.  Originally I planned to take a cab to a nearby wetlands but it was raining and the cab situation was not reliable.  I didn't want to get caught out in the rain and have to look for a cab.  Initially the room was not ready so I had to check my bags with the front desk.

European Robin - as is usual with birds, you get most of them in the parking lot of where you start.  These little songbirds will sing year round and there were tons of them around.  Most of the birds I saw here were the same ones I saw on my recent trip to London.

Eurasian Blackbird - here is one someone should be renaming.  Its not even a blackbird but actually a Turdus thrush. 

I was a little surprised to see tons of Rose-ringed Parakeets here.  I did a little digging and apparently they were established in Belgium before they were in London.  Lore has it that the zoo keeper in Brussels intentionally let some out to provide some local color and then they spread like wildfire.

I was not expecting anything but Black-headed Gulls on the lake, but this one had white primary feathers which made me initially lean to Mediterranean Gull which was a lifer!  However, upon closer inspection, the ear patch was not right for that species and when the bird took flight, I saw that it had some random black in the primaries.  The underwing was not dark like a typical Black-headed Gull so there was definitely something going on here.  Turns out that Mediterranean Gulls will hybridize with Black-headed so I then that is where I leaned.  However, an eBird reviewer in Belgium reached out and confirmed it was just a partially leucistic Black-headed Gull.  Double doh!

Weird bird. 

Great Crested Grebe - the harsh light on the water was not good for photography.

I found a couple Gray Wagtails which I have seen in Norway before.

Common Chaffinches were also in abundance. 

I believe all the Cormorants were Great and the Herons were Gray.

Great Egret is a species that has only been recently expanding further into northern Europe.

Best bird of the day was this Common Kingfisher in the pond right next to the hotel. This was a lifer for me.

Eurasian Magpies are common but I don't think I would ever grow tired of them.

It was nice to study the Gray Herons more because I would love to be the first person to find one in North Carolina and you need to know your difference between our Great Blue and the Gray which can be subtle if you aren't paying attention.  The Gray had white upper legs versus the Great Blue's rufous pants and also the neck has more white and black streaking.

Egyptian Goose is an established exotic common throughout Europe.

I was able to check into my room and have lunch at the Chateau before setting off again.  I looked at google maps and saw some farm fields about a mile up a big hill so off I went in search of some different habitat.

Once I got up the hill from the lake and through the little town, the countryside began to open up with farm fields.  I picked up some distant Black Redstarts and more common species, but for the most part there was not much going on in the monoculture fields.

It seemed like most of the fields were chards or something like that.

I walked over an hour on country roads looking through some of the recently plowed fields hoping for some activity and finally found one field that had tons of Carrion Crows foraging so I took a spur road and hoped for the best.  As I got closer I flushed a huge flock of Eurasian Skylarks which were perfectly camouflaged int he dirt.

Eurasian Skylark  - a few remained in the stubble but they were far off and I only managed a few passable photos.

Most of my photos were of birds in flight as they periodically flushed and landed.

It was a little frustrating because they never really got close enough for a proper crushing.

Eventually I did spot an Eurasian Kestrel and a distant Harrier which I thin was a Hen Harrier. Only the kestrel came close enough for some pics.

It was getting late so I hoofed it back down the hill to the chateau.

Eurasian Moorhen 

I ended up only 34 species after a whole day of birding in Belgium probably mostly because of the poor weather.  It rained on and off the whole time I was there.  The rest of the week was spent from sunup to sundown in all day meetings so the camera stayed in the bag.

I hope to head back and properly explore Belgium in the future.