Late March Cabin Fever

Just itching for Spring .... and recovering from Gull-issues

I keep meaning to do a blog post, truly I do, it's just that I haven't really had much to blog about nature-wise so far this year.  To date 2015 has been dominated by work (yes, I do work) and snow, and neither of those things has really been very conducive to looking at nature or nature blogging.  Even my travel - Montreal, London, Wales, Washington DC) has not really been very outdoor oriented so far, and I just haven't seen a lot of stuff worth reporting.

This week, it snowed again, but at least there's something about a late March snow storm that makes you feel like the worst may now be over and that Winter might be finally behind us.  For whatever reason, I was really feeling the cabin fever today, a sure sign that Spring is coming and that my nature addiction is close to kicking back in again after a dormant Winter.  Looking forward to putting Winter away and getting out there once again.

 The 2015 birding year actually started out relatively well for me and I managed to grab some free time and get out a few times locally in the first few weeks of the year.  Some good birds quickly joined the list - Couch's Kingbird in the West Village, Cassin's Kingbird in Brooklyn, Harlequin Ducks at Montauk, a drake King Eider and Iceland Gulls at Shinecock, Tundra Swans in East Hampton, and a Cackling Goose near Riverhead.  I even managed to get a State Bird when I chased down a THICK-BILLED MURRE in Montauk Harbor (NYS #381).

Thick-billed Murre - lousy shot but it was a state bird!

I soon started to get that slipping feeling though.  Others were going out birding more, and finding great birds, and I simply wasn't keeping up, not with the time I had available to me to get out into the field.  For a brief while I fought the rot, chased the Pink-footed Goose (dipped) near Riverhead, the Barnacle Geese (dipped) near Calverton, and the GYRFALCON (yes!) near Wallkill, but eventually I had to recognize that this is just not going to be a big year list year for me in New York.
As of today, I've seen only 110 species this year in New York State, while the more serious guys are already in the 160s.  I've missed way too many Winter birds to be able to catch up - no Snowy Owls, no Glaucous Gulls,  no Barrow's Goldeneye, etc.  I'll just have to enjoy what I see and not worry about year-lisiting this year.

Harequin Ducks (above) and Common Redpoll (below) good January birds
out on the East End this year.

The bird that really killed my year-list this year was actually a gull.  A Common Gull no less!  Well technically a Mew Gull (although that's currently the same species as Common Gull), and actually not at all common here, thousands of miles away from the Pacific NorthWest where it makes it's home.  The bird was found by Shane Blodgett and showed up, as rare gulls are prone to doing, in a shopping mall parking lot in Brooklyn.  Many birders got to see it the first week or so it was there (while I wasn't able to travel) and then it fell into an infuriating pattern of vanishing for days or weeks before suddenly and unexpectedly popping up again in the same area.  I really wanted to see this bird which would have been a new species for New York State for me, and it also happens to be a species I've tried for and missed previously.  So I decided to devote a few hours to a search......

Herring Gull, MEW GULL, and Ring-billed Gull - photo: Shane Blodgett (used with permission)

And so I ended up spending the better part of five (5!) days standing, freezing, in parking lots in Brooklyn (and not the trendy bits of Brooklyn), looking at gulls.  Every couple of hours a little old Russian lady might come by, empty a bag of stale bread, and start a mad swirl of activity as hundreds of gulls, dozens of Rock Pigeons, and even a few Brown Rats squabbled over the feast, but most of the time Mew Gull 'watching' involved just standing around in the cold, periodically checking hundreds of Ring-billed gulls to see if 'the bird' had flown in.  After each session I swore I would give up on this gull and go look for other things, and then a few days later someone would see the damned bird, and I'd give it one more try.  In total, this single bird took more than 50% of the free time I had for birding in the first quarter of 2015.  And no ... I did not see the bird.

Iceland Gull - people often reported seeing the Mew Gull with
this Iceland Gull.  It was stubbornly solo while I was there though

And so, as we roll in to Spring I'm ready to put the Mew Gull behind me and move on. I almost gave it one last try this Saturday after a sighting was reported on Friday.  In the end I was saved my Shane though, he emailed me to say that he'd seen photos of the Friday sighting and that the bird was just a dark Ring-billed Gull.  Even though I'd already sworn that I wouldn't try again, Shane new that I probably would (and he was right - I am that stubborn).  But now I'm letting it go, and moving on, and getting excited for Spring.


Postscript:  I finished writing this blog post, went out to brunch with Kelvin and had a mimosa or two(enough to ensure that I could no longer drive for the day).  After brunch I checked my emails and, total predictably, Andrew Baksh posted that he and Angus Wilson had been watching the Mew Gull in Brooklyn for the past couple of hours.  After a week or so absence, the bird had literally reappeared while I was writing this post.  I give up ....

Gyrfalcons are really, really cool.

So first let me say that Gyrfalcons are incredibly cool, perhaps one of the coolest birds likely to ever show up on the East Coast in Winter.  Birders are quite simply blown away by them and many wait years before they finally get to see one of these incredible high Arctic falcons.  They've been impressing people for a very long time too, Viking Kings and Medieval Monarchs coveted them and their image has been used in everything from fine art to fantasy fighter-jet designs.  Every birder hopes to find one of these incredible birds one day and in fact there have been a couple reported on the East Coast this Winter ... but somehow they seem to have generated as much angst as they have excitement.

Gyrfalcon by John James Audubon (perhaps one of his best known pieces).  Unfortunately,
most Gyrfalcons are gray or brown and the pure white form is rarely seen down here in
the South (well this is the South if you're a Gyrfalcon).

In early January a Gyrfalcon was found in the Connecticut River Valley in Central Massachusetts but the bird was hard to pin down and thus seen only occasionally by a few lucky observers.  Then last week hotshot Mass birder Marshall Iliff managed to find out where the bird was roosting every night - quiet an achievement in and of itself - and suddenly had to face a real dilemma.  Gyrfalcons are apparently still at risk of being trapped by falconers, and it seems that this has happened recently to at least one falcon.  If Marshall publicized the location of the falcon's roost he might be putting the bird at risk.  On the other hand, there are an awful lot of birders out there who would really, really like to see a Gyrfalcon.  In the end he compromised, setting up a sign-up sheet for folks who wanted to visit the falcon roost, a method which would hopefully let keen birders see the bird but allow the locals to vet out those who might be out to do no good.  Not sure if this approach will work, but after a lot of obvious angst, this was the approach that the Mass birders chose to take and initial reports seem positive.

I'd largely ignored the Massachusetts falcon shenanigans (I've already seen two Gyrfalcons in Massachusetts) until early Saturday morning when I got an email from Angus Wilson.  Apparently several New York birders had reported a Gyrfalcon on Long Island five days previously and the news was just getting out now (!).  Needless to say, a lot of folks (myself included) who hadn't heard a thing about it were a little 'surprised'.  Still I tried to put it out of my mind, and at 7am when I got up to go birding, I decided against going to chase a five-day-old Gyrfalcon record and headed out to Montauk instead.

Montauk was pleasant and I spent a happy few hours looking at scoters, eiders, two Iceland Gulls, some Great Cormorants, and several other nice Winter birds.  Then, just as I was scanning Ice-House pond for ducks, I got a call from Corey Finger ... apparently the Gyrfalcon had been seen again a few hours earlier.

Whenever Corey calls me with news of a rarity I am always at the wrong end of the island.  Today was no exception but I didn't hesitate to head back to the car and plot a course to the location of the last sighting.  These drives are excruciatingly tense experiences and each 'real-time' update just adds to the stress level.   It took me an hour and thirty minutes to get to Gilgo Beach and while I was driving I heard that the bird had been re-found but was very distant.  I heard that the ID was not 100% pinned down but that it looked good.  I heard that it was now raining heavily (which I hoped would keep the bird in place) which was severely impacted visibility - a distant blob in the rain.  I heard that the bird had been seen to flap it's wings and was definitely a large falcon.  Every minute was an eternity but in the end I pulled into the parking lot and joined Corey, Seth Ausubel and Pat Lindsay (and soon thereafter Shai Mitra) who were scoping a distant falcon in the rain.

The falcon was a long way away but my first impression was positive.  It had the 'husky' look that Gyrfalcons have, and more importantly it had relatively short wings what projected only part way down the tail.  While the views weren't great I pretty quickly realized that this was a 'Gyr' but stuck around for a while hoping that the weather would clear or that the bird would fly.  The rain kept coming though and the bird stayed hunkered down so in the end I reluctantly headed back Out East hoping for better views the next day.

A 'lump' on an Osprey-platform  ..... which at 60x through the scope turned out to be
the Gyrfalcon.  The photo below is massively cropped but you can see what it is.

I didn't rush back to Gilgo Beach on Sunday so when I pulled into the parking lot at around 9am I joined a fairly large group of birders who were watching the bird.  Over the next couple of hours we had distant, but satisfying, scope views of the Gyrfalcon sitting on Osprey-platforms, flying across the marsh, and even catching, plucking, and eating a Black Duck.  Lots of birders arrived throughout the morning and everyone seemed pretty excited, and relieved, to see the bird.  Here are some better photographs (and some commentary) from Corey Finger over at 10,000 Birds.

So why had it taken nearly a week to get the word out on this bird?  Well apparently the folks who'd originally found the bird were worried about falconers after hearing the story from Massachusetts (as recounted here).  Unlike Mass though there wasn't an attempt to organize broad access to the bird and only a small group of 'friends of the finders' were let in on the secret and saw the bird during its brief first appearance.  The news of the sighting only came out five days later when the finders, having not seen the bird in a while, assumed that it had left the area and was thus safe from threats.  Can you fault their intent ... no, not at all ... although I think the location of the bird would have made it really hard for a falconer to do it harm.  Still, Long Island has a horrible history of record suppression and of cliquish birding circles not sharing information.  Things seem to have been a lot better in recent years but a situation like this definitely reminded a lot of folks of the 'bad old days' and left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.   There are probably no right answers to a situation like this, but I'm sure it'll be much discussed in the coming months.  In the end, most everyone who wanted to see the bird got to see it, so I'm sure that all will be forgiven.  Who knew that watching birds came with all these social and ethical dilemmas?

In the end I was happy (although I am going to buy a new digiscope rig after the frustration of trying to get any kind of shot at that distance).  The Gyrfalcon was a state bird, only my 3rd in the ABA, and only the 7th one I've ever seen.  A very special bird, and I'm glad I got to see it.