Do Henslow's Sparrows really exist in New York?

I saw my life Henslow's Sparrow in Pennsylvania in 1992.  Relatively newly arrived in the US, my friend Jim Shoemaker invited me out to get a my life bird at a breeding site that he knew near his childhood home near Wilkes-Barre.  We went out, arrived at the site at dawn, and quickly had great scope views of the birds singing while sitting up in the grass.  I saw a few more birds a little later that Spring.  Not so tough really, not sure what the big deal is .....

Fast forward 20-years and come the Spring of 2012, I hadn't seen another one since.  So I knew I'd have to do some work if I wanted one for my New York year list.   To cut a long story short, I put in some miles and some hours and I've had 5 Henslow's "experiences" so far this year.  Today I officially declared victory and stopped trying to get better views.  Henslow's turns out to be the most mercurial and frustrating of birds.  Perhaps that first day was a fluke after all.

May 22nd - Triangle Road: late in the day with Joan Collins and Richard Fried.  Joan can hear Henslow's Sparrows and now Richard can hear them too.  I can't hear them.  Or can I?  What does a grasshopper fart sound like?  Are they similar?  Eventually I get on what the others are hearing and it does sound good, but I'd really like a look at a bird.  We spend a fair amount of time there but we don't see any birds, and even though I'm more comfortable with the calls, I pronounce the whole thing a most unsatisfying experience and head back to the mountains to get back to the serious business of not seeing Spruce Grouse.

June 2nd - Dog Hill Road: with Benjamin Van Doren.   We get to the Perch River site mid-morning and we don't hear any Henslow's Sparrows, despite others having reported them recently.  I know that Benjamin has been skeptical about the Triangle Road site but agree to run up there anyway.  We get there mid day and we don't hear any Henslow's Sparrows there either.  Benjamin says the habitat looks wrong and can barely contain his skepticism.  Henslow's Sparrow would be a life bird for him.  I think they're punishing his lack of faith and sitting tight-lipped just out of view.

June 12th - Dog Hill Road: an impromptu side-trip on the way from Rochester to NYC (it's only an hour or two out of the way, each way) inspired by Chris Wood's recent Gray Partridge sighting.  It has been raining all morning and by the time I get to Perch River it really doesn't look like its going to be letting up any time soon.  When I pull into the Gray Partridge site (which is also the Henslow's site) I have low expectations, but even though its raining, there's a Henslow's Sparrow singing in the field.  I listen for a while, get out of the car, get soaked, get back in the car, and decide to call it a day and head South.  The rain is now torrential and the six-hour drive South is miserable.

July 10th - Dog Hill Road: it's dusk and I'm cruising slowly along the road hoping for Chris Wood's famous Gray Partridge (famous in my imagination at least).  As I pull into the small parking lot I'm surprised to hear a Henslow's Sparrow calling loudly and close to the road.  I get out and listen, perhaps a second one calling too, and then flight views and a brief perched view.  How very cooperative!  With the light fading though, the camera stays in the car and I resign myself to a 4am alarm call, hoping that they'll be sitting up and singing early in the morning.

July 11th - Dog Hill Road:  fortified by Ramada Inn instant coffee, I head out early and get to Perch River at around 5am.  As I pull up to the site with the windows open, I can hear Henslow's Sparrows singing from the car.  I jump out, walk over the edge of the grass closest to the nearest of two singing birds, and turn on the camera.  After a lot of squinting, many mosquito bites, and a few position changes, I spot the bird, point the camera, and take about 100 completely out-of-focus shots!  In the low light my auto-focus just can't distinguish the small brown streaky sparrow from the large brown streaky field of grass.  But as the light improves, the camera gets a bit smarter and I manage to get the all important "proof" shot (below).

Henslow's Sparrow

So the last two days, the birds were positively easy - sitting out in the open (ish), singing loudly, and hanging out close to the road.  On other visits to the same site, there was not even a hint of the birds.  Perhaps the low light (dusk, dawn, heavy rain) helps a lot, or perhaps the bird is just mercurial.  Either way, I'm sure they're under-recorded, and that there are more out there to be found.  I do have to admit though that I've actually grown quite fond of them during this whole process.

Beware the North Muck - Danger!

Like many New York birders, I've seen the maps of Jamaica Bay's East Pond showing the "easy" and "difficult" passage through the mud, and the myriad names of bays, mud-spits and other geographic features.   Dead Man's Cove always sounds so much more interesting than Sanderling Point for some reason, even if it doesn't necessarily get better birds.  If I'm honest, I've also laughed to myself about the the "DANGER!" annotations at several spots around the pond presumably denoting deeper mud.  How deep could it be after all?  While I admit that the "North Muck" has always looked like an area that I didn't really want to get too close to, I figured that the mud depth would change incrementally, allowing a wayward birder plenty of time to reverse course.

Well after last week, when a birder went chest-deep into the North Muck and had to be rescued by Rangers (a rescue apparently taking several hours) before being hosed down in the parking lot, well lets just say I'm following the map very, very carefully from now on.

No worries today though, the East Pond behaved perfectly.  The temperature was pleasant, perhaps 15-degrees cooler than the weekend, with cloud cover and even a pleasant breeze.  I just don't know why folks complain about the place, it was positively lovely this morning.  I also had the place to myself - only once was I yanked off my scope to be interrogated by anxious-looking Ruff hunters - quite a perfect morning of shorebirding in fact.

Pectoral Sandpiper (with Least Sandpiper and Short-billed Dowitcher shadows)

Among the 800-1,000 shorebirds at the North end of the East Pool today I managed to winkle out two New York State year-birds; a Pectoral Sandpiper (#325), and a couple of Stilt Sandpipers (#326).  All birds that had been reported by many folks over the weekend while I was Out East, so nice to do such a comprehensive catch-up on a Monday morning, even if I was 'dowitcher-blind' by the end of the day.

Maybe something other than shorebirds tomorrow .....

More Cupsogue / Dune Road Shorebirds

Spent the last two mornings on the rising tide at Cupsogue Flats hoping for a few new shorebirds.  I seem to be in a bit of a year-bird slump with others having seen five or six species recently that would have been year birds for me.  By far the best thing I missed was the Brown Booby that Derek Rogers and Ari Gilbert had at Cupsogue on Thursday, a truly great find.  While I wasn't expecting that bird to put on a repeat performance,  there have been a few shorebirds around that I wanted to catch up on.

Cupsogue is slowly changing as fall migration gets underway with subtle changes in the mix of birds from week to week.  The dominant shorebird now is Short-billed Dowitcher, including a couple of nice red-breasted "Prairie Race" type birds.  Tried hard to winkled out a Long-billed Dowitcher, but no luck so far.

Short-billed Dowitcher

Other have included an increasing number of migrant Least Sandpipers, the odd "Western Willet" and a good mix of terns, which today included 5 Black Terns in various plumages.

Least Sandpiper

Back along Dune Road I picked up Yellow-crowned Night Heron and an American Bittern (my second recently, but an unseasonal record down here on the coast, presumably an early migrant).  Best bird so far this weekend though was a WHIMBREL at Ponquogue (NYS year-bird #324).  Never a predictable bird here and a good one to get out of the way.

American Bittern

Whimbrel (sometimes you have to just grab a shot to prove that you saw it)

Blasts from the Past: Peruvian Hummingbirds

[Random shots from my travels around the world over the years]
A couple of neat, and quite similar, hummingbirds from coastal Peru.

Peruvian Sheartail

Oasis Hummingbird

Another day, another Ruff ...

This one was at Jamaica Bay (found by Andrew Baksh a few days back) on the East Pond.  Lots of birders getting good looks today.

Gray Tree Frogs and other critters in the yard

For the past couple of weeks we've had a Gray Tree Frog in the swimming pool.  Each evening it calls from inside the pool filter and each time I catch it and move it back to the woods, it finds a way to return the next day.  Eventually I gave up and left it in sole possession of the pool.  We've theorized that perhaps the pool filter amplifies the frog's calls in a way that entices it to keep coming back.  Either way, it seems attached to the spot.  It seems happy, although we aren't too confident about his chances with the lady frogs.

Gray Tree Frog

And here are some of the other Reptiles and Amphibians we've had in the yard recently ...

Eastern Milk-Snake

Northern Ring-necked Snake

Eastern Box-Turtle

Eastern Spadefoot Toad

Anyone fancy a Sandwich?

While driving Out East on Long Island on Thursday, I get a call from Shaibal Mitra who has a Sandwich Tern in view on the flats at Cupsogue.  I'm only 45 minutes away, so I re-route, but within minutes he calls back to say that a mosquito-spraying helicopter has come by and cleared the flats completely, with the Sandwich Tern last seen heading East.  And so a weekend of searching for Sandwich Tern begins ....

Sandwich Terns aren't all that rare in New York, but they certainly aren't common and you do have to go and look for them.  They drop by the flats and tern colonies along the Long Island beaches in Summer each year and sometimes, as after Hurricane Irene last year, can be quite regular.  In other years though, they aren't as abundant and could be missed, so I wanted to try to get this species while it was being reported.

On Friday, I'm offshore on a boat in the morning, battling 8-10 foot swells and not seeing much in the way of sea-birds, so of course when I get back to land I hear that almost every East End birder has seen one or more of perhaps three Sandwich Terns at Cupsogue during the day.   Against my better judgement, I head over there at the high tide, missing the last report by 45 minutes and again dipping the Sandwich Terns.

Red Knots

I have something of a love-hate relationship with Cupsogue.  On the plus side, the birds are great and I spend three hours there on Friday night enjoying large numbers of shorebirds, including Red Knots, White-rumped Sandpipers, etc.  There are also good breeding birds to see, like Saltmarsh and Seaside Sparrows, and I even add a Suffolk County year-bird when a Little Blue Heron flies over.  On the downside, Cupsogue is crowded, costs $15 to park, requires a hike through, well let's just call it "mud", has rapidly shifting tides, and a healthy population of ferocious biting insects.  Not everyone's idea of an ideal day at the beach.

White-rumped Sandpiper and Semipalmated Sandpiper

Saturday, and round three with Cupsogue.  Even though I know that the evening and the rising tide will be better (based on an Andrew Baksh post from the night before), I'm restricted to a morning visit and decide to give it a try anyway.  There are lots of birders, and lots of terns, including Roseates and a few Royal Terns, but no Sandwich Tern, at least while I'm there.  In fact, no-one sees one on Saturday, so I'm wondering if the birds have moved on.

Saltmarsh Sparrow

Sunday presents a last chance to try the flats and I arrive at 3:30pm to find Seth Ausubel leaving the flats after an epic all day session.  I can't get out as far as I want to due to the rapidly rising tide, so I make a strategic retreat, stopping and scanning as I work my way back to dry land.  When I get there, and clamber out onto the muddy trail-head, I turn for one last scan, and pick up a distant Sandwich Tern!  After many hours of scanning the flats, it popped up just as I was about to give in and call it a day.   I get some truly horrible iPhone shots at 60x through the scope, call Seth (who unfortunately is well on his way back towards the City) and then squelch up the trail and back to the car.  New York year bird #323, and perhaps Cupsogue isn't such a bad place after all ....

Sandwich Term with Common Tern