July 4th in the Hamptons

Some Local Birding from my Home in East Hampton

Planned to spend the long July 4th Holiday weekend out at the house in NorthWest Harbor, and with only a few house guests I was able to grab three blocks of time to do some local birding.

Saturday, July 1 - Cupsogue and Mecox

Up bright and early and off in search of a recently reported Sandwich Tern at Cupsogue.  Made a quick stop at Mecox, which was pretty quiet, especially after a Bald Eagle passed over flushing the few birds that there were on the sand bank, then off to Hampton Bays.  This was my fourth trip to Cupsogue this 'tern season' and the first one where I wasn't likely to be the only birder present, indeed the report of a Sandwich Tern the day before (scarce but annual in New York State) looked likely to bring out a crowd.  Menachin Goldstein had posted that the bird was roosting on 'mussel beds' and, not sure where they might be, I took my usual route out towards the flats.

I usually come to Cuposgue close to the top of the rising tide, which concentrates the terns and shorebirds in a place easier to see them up close.  Today though the tide was low and, as I walked in I saw some mussel beds that I don't usually see or scan.  It felt like a good idea to do a quick scan there and sure enough, the Sandwich Tern was one of the first birds I saw, standing out from the Common Terns mostly by being so much obviously whiter, even at a distance.

Bad, distant 'digi-phone' image of a Sandwich Tern.

I put the tern sighting on the New York State rare bird ListServe and soon enough other birders came by to see it.  I then spent the next three hours birding in the area, seeing nothing terribly unusual to be honest, but mostly catching up with other local birders and generally being social.  Standing around chatting on a mud-flat in the middle of a salt marsh is the sort of the birder equivalent of social time, or brunch I guess.

Sunday, July 2 - Whale Watching Boat out of Montauk

After the June pelagic trip got cancelled, I'd been thinking of ways to get to see some of the shearwaters I was still missing for the year.  Sea-watching wasn't coming up with much so I decided to take the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island (CRESLI) / Viking Fleet Whale-watching boat out of Montauk.  For $75, the boat (a big fishing boat) gets you offshore for 5-6 hours and, while it doesn't get out to the canyons or true pelagic waters, it does get you 30-40 miles out to feeding areas where there are (hopefully) whales and sea birds.

Ocean Sunfish or Mola Mola

The ride out was pretty quiet for a while but as we got further from shore I started to pick up a few shearwaters and storm-petrels.  All of a sudden though we found ourselves among the whales and spent and hour or so with multiple baleen-whales - eight Fin Whales and a Minke Whale - pretty much constantly in view.

Fin Whale

Whatever the whales were eating was also good for the sea birds and there were lots of them in the same area.  My estimated counts included 120 Wilson's Storm-Petrels, 80 Cory's Shearwaters (including a Scopoli's Shearwater), 40 Great Shearwaters, 25 Sooty Shearwaters and 4 Manx Shearwaters.  Pretty much all the sea birds I'd been missing for the year .... except for one ....

Cory's Shearwater (above) and Great Shearwater (below)

Mixed Shearwater flock including some Sooty Shearwaters

Manx Shearwater

Then something unexpected happened.  I was looking at a distant flock of shearwaters sitting on the surface when a bird took off and showed huge white wind flashes .... Skua!  Well it turns out that when you shout "Skua!" on a boat full on non-birdwatching tourists out looking for whales, you get some odd looks.  I think I probably scared a few people and no-one rushed over to see what a Skua was.  The bird itself was flying away from us and I was scrambling to get some photographs, so no-one other than me got to see it.  One of the tourists came over after the fact to ask what all the fuss was about, the rest I think just decided that I was a crazy person and kept their distance.

I was very happy though, SOUTH POLAR SKUA is a very good bird in New York State and the bird I was most hoping for on the June pelagic trips that have been canceled due to weather for the past two years.  It was also New York State Bird #396 for me (this was before they lumped Thayer's Gull so I guess I'm back to 395 now).  While I debated the ID for a while wanting to make sure I wasn't being fooled by a large, dark Pomarine Jaeger, I was VERY glad that I had my camera with me, and very happy that I took the boat that day ... great trip.

Two very bad, distant and heavily cropped shots of a South Polar Skua

Tuesday, July 4 - Local Spots in East Hampton

Less time for birding so decided to put some local eBird hours in and checked several spots close to the house, counting Piping Plover and Least Tern colonies, checking up on local breeding warbler sites, and visiting a few spots that don't get a lot of coverage.  I also moved a couple of Eastern Box Turtles away from the road .... lots of good karma built up for future birding adventures.

I ended up seeing 105 species over the weekend in The Hamptons - not bad for a crowded resort area on the busiest tourist weekend of the year.  Despite the crowds, there's still a lot of wildlife to be seen out there, and it is a spectacularly beautiful area.  Happy holidays indeed.

NYS 2012 Big Year Summary (Part 3)

JULY
So I came into July at 322 species (only 30 shy of the state record) and with an epic June behind me.  I was feeling pretty good about myself and my prospects for breaking the record in the Summer.  After all, Richard Fried had seen a ton of Hurricane Irene waifs and strays, pelagic birds, and other vagrants in the Summer.  Visions of 365, or even 375 swirled in my head.  And then .... well I basically hit a wall and endured three months of pretty crappy birding.  I put in huge numbers of hours and miles, and added very few birds.  I guess Big Years aren't all fun and giggles.

In total I added only 8 year birds during the month of July.  Almost all of them seemed to be hard fought.  A Sandwich Tern required multiple visits to the baking, fly-bitten flats of Cupsogue before it surrendered, and Whimbrel gave in only after an epic number of days searching the bays and flats out East.  I did pick up a few shorebirds, with Stilt Sandpiper, American Avocet and Pectoral Sandpiper at Jamaica Bay and again have to thank for Andrew Baksh for (practically living in the mud at Jamaica Bay all Summer and) keeping me up to speed on the shorebird comings and goings.

Considering I spent so many dozens of hours standing out feeding the biting flies and risking sun-stroke or drowning at Cupsogue, it's perhaps ironic that I wasn't there on the day that Derek Rogers and Ari Gilbert had a Brown Booby fly right over them on the flats.  My attempts at pelagic-birding were also dismal failiures with several charters producing very little in terms of birds and my resorting to Whale-watching boats to get out to sea (they didn't produce much either).

Black-bellied Whistling-Duck after a seriously long drive.

To add birds I ran up to St. Lawrence and Jefferson Counties twice (it's an awfully long way to St. Lawrence County).  One trip added a Black-bellied Whistling-Duck but another added Sedge Wren and Common Nighthawk only after literally days of searching.  And I still couldn't find a Gray Partridge (!) despite serious hours and effort on my part.

AUGUST
So after the dismal July, I was hoping August would be better .... but it wasn't.  I added only 6 species the whole month although I was out birding every day.  With no Summer hurricane, there just weren't a lot of birds to chase.  I did run up to Niagara for a Franklin's Gull but missed it.  I also spent a lot of time out on whale-watching boats, and while I did see lots of dolphins and sea-turtles, I didn't add any birds.

Presumed 'Scopoli's Shearwater' out of Montauk.  Not a species as of yet
but maybe a split one day.

The only adds for August were five species of shorebirds and an American White Pelican at Jamaica Bay.  No vagrants, no seabirds, not all that much fun to be honest.

SEPTEMBER
So this month had to get better right?  Maybe some vagrants?  Or a hurricane?  Or some rare seabirds?

On the plus side a Fork-tailed Flycatcher caused a mad scramble and was a state bird for me - while I missed Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, Ash-throated Flycatcher and Say's Phoebe this year I can hardly complain after lucking into quick views of the short-staying, and infinitely rarer Fork-tailed.  I also managed to finally get out to the Hudson Canyon for a real pelagic trip (after several other bookings on pelagics and fishing boats were cancelled).  Audubon's Shearwater and Leach's Storm-Petrel got to join the list at least, even if we didn't connect with any of the real pelagic goodies.   On the shorebird front, Hudsonian Godwit finally made it onto the list after several misses and a lot of time spent searching for this species.  I was getting through the list of expected birds, it was just really, really hard work.

I ended up seeing lots of Red-necked and Wilson's Phalaropes this year
but somehow managed to miss Red Phalarope.  These Red-necked Phalaropes
were out at the Hudson Canyon.

Even with these birds though, I still only managed 6 year birds in September.  Ever willing to jump in the car for a 15-hour round-trip drive I ran to Rochester for a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper but was a day late.  I also started to get nervous about Brown Pelican as I stubbornly managed to miss the very few that showed up this year.  Seabirds in general did not go well for me this year and by the end of September it became obvious that I'd botched my Summer pelagic season and now missed a good handful of species that were possible with better planning.

Richard Fried had been kind enough to share his record 2011 list with me and I kept staring at this big cluster of year birds that he got in the Summer, and that I simply wasn't replicating.   It's not that there weren't birds around, there were plenty of birds and it was actually a pretty good shorebird season overall (and I did see 38 species of shorebird in New York State this year).  I think it was more that the Summer really highlights the downside of Big Years, and the flip-side of all those endorphins from year birds in May.  Big Years are by their nature extremely goal focussed and it gets tougher and tougher to get new birds as the year moves on.  A great day of shorebirding where I saw 15 species of shorebird including a Ruff at Jamaica Bay would be a really great feeling in any normal year, but this year ... no Hudsonian Godwit .... no smiles.  To be honest I really wasn't having a lot of fun with the whole project by this point and, if I hadn't already sunk so much time into it I would seriously have considered easing off.  At the very least I went into October with 342 species, serious doubts about breaking the record, and really hoping for a change of luck.

Another new Atlantic Shearwater to worry about?

Once upon a time there were just 5 species of Shearwater we had to worry about in the North Atlantic (Great, Cory's, Sooty, Manx, Audubon's) and life was good.  Then along came some splitters and pointed out that the situation was probably a tad more complex than we had thought, leading to Yelkouan Shearwater and Balearic Shearwater.  More recently, we got to start fretting about Cape Verde Shearwater, and the one I missed this Spring off Long Island (while I was in the Adirondacks, feeding the mosquitos and not seeing Spruce Grouse) still rankles a bit.  Now, it looks as though Scopoli's Shearwater (the Mediterranean breeding populations of Cory's Shearwater) is set to become a species too.  So, in short, no more off-the-cuff Cory's Shearwater IDs and each bird now has to be studied to tease apart these sister species.

Went out on the CRESLI (Coastal Research and Conservation Society of Long Island) Whale-watching trip on the Viking Fleet yesterday.  A number of New York birders including Corey Finger, Richard Fried and Shaibal Mitra initially planned to go, but they dropped out one-by-one leaving just me, Jacob Drucker and Lila Fried boarding the boat at 9:30am.  I rarely go out with this crew because they are primarily focussed on Whales and Dolphins, stray often into Rhode Island waters, and don't tend to go very far offshore.  Having said that, it is a cheap way to get out on the water and for only $75, you are at least out there 10-30 miles South of Long Island, and who knows what might show up.

As it happens, there wasn't that much to see bird-wise, or whale-wise for that matter, but we did eventually bump into a pod of about 60 Short-beaked Common Dolphins which made the Whale-watching part of the trip a big success for the, mostly French, tourists on board.   A Kemp's Ridley-Turtle was also notable, albeit seen briefly, as were a couple of breaching Basking Sharks.

Short-beaked common Dolphin (2 shots)

Back to the birds and we worked pretty hard all day, picking up a single Parasitic Jaeger, 95 Wilson's Storm-Petrels, 15 Great Shearwaters and about 20 "Cory's Shearwaters".  Within the Cory's, some were indeterminate, most were the borealis ssp. but one bird looked pretty good for a SCOPOLI'S SHEARWATER, showing lots of white on the primaries.  I don't think it's a slam-dunk, the white is not as crisp as some of the illustrations/pictures I've seen, but it was at least intriguingly different and we reported it as a "possible" Scopoli's, putting photos out there for comment.

'borealis' Cory's Shearwater - note all dark primaries.

Possible Scopoli's Shearwater (2 shots) - note pale bases to primaries.

Scopoli's is supposed to also be smaller, lighter in build, and paler than Cory's and while it did seem to be a lightly-built bird, paleness is really difficult to discern when so many of the Cory's were in molt and looking pretty scruffy.  Still, an interesting bird, and no doubt one that we'll all be getting used to (expert at) differentiating if indeed it does get split.

Update:  as of September 2012, the BOU has split this species.  Who knows whether the AOU (or Clements, which matters more for World Listers) will follow suit.