Spotted Towhee, Palmyra, Dec 12th

I decided to do a little morning birding at Palmyra Cove, where the shortest route for me was actually through PA (Cottman Ave exit off I-95). From the parking lot a flock of Snow Geese were overhead - probably migrating south on the north wind. Sparrows were the target of this trip, and there were quite a few Fox Sparrows present, including at least one singing. At the junction of Saw Whet and Red-winged Blackbird trails - the anointed location for the towhee - there were more Fox, White-throated Sparrows plus Junco, but the towees were elusive, calling every so often from deep in the phragmites. Moving into a better light angle, I found a female Eastern Towhee after about an hour at this place, and then another birder found the Spotted and I re-found it about 15 minutes afterward. Not, as it turned out, the most spectacular experience [I may be a little jaded, currently] and not even a year bird but at least moderately exotic for NJ.

Ivory Gull in Cape May, Nov 28th

Recovering from a late night the previous day I made it down to Cape May in the afternoon in search of the immature Ivory Gull that had been present for 2 days in Cape May harbor. I saw it even before I locked the car, at the Bree-Zee-Lee yacht basin along the north side of Cape May harbor. It flew around almost constantly during the few hours I was there, perhaps searching for scraps on the high tide, although it had been seen feeding on a fish that same morning. I grabbed more than a few snaps, of which six are at http://www.catharus.com/gallery2/v/gulls/ivory_gull/ .

(Edit: still present as of Nov 30th, first discovered Nov 27th)

Mixed feelings about raptors

Returning from South Amboy, I was unloading the wood I'd bought from the car when I noticed a Chickadee alarm call and something moving in my spruce patch. After grabbing the binoculars I was able to watch an adult Sharp-shinned Hawk eat a sparrow (probably White-throated) it had apparently just caught. Took it about 10-15 minutes to get most of the way through it.

Such is the nature of feeders - I attract birds and the small passerines attract raptors. This is the first raptor actually *on* the property, so it would be helpful if it was just passing through since I wasn't planning on maintaining a raptor feeding station. The feeders have yet to become very active, perhaps in part because of the warmer weather, but probably also because of the better seed crop this year - at least judging from the number of acorns littering my back lawn.

Black Brant, Western Grebe at South Amboy

Disinclined to chase the Pink-footed Goose on Long Island, I decided to try and find the Western Grebe that has been hanging out in the Raritan Bay the last few winters, preferably in NJ waters. So I made one of my periodic trips to Raritan Bay Waterfront Park in South Amboy.

First thing I did find was an adult Black Brant in the ball fields amongst a flock of Atlantic Brant. While getting bad photos if it (e.g. http://www.flickr.com/photos/phil-jeffrey/4125442731/) I bumped into Tom Burke and Gail Benson who told me where the Western Grebe was (1/2 mile west of the park) so after the Brant left for more distant fields I spent the next hour or so scanning the water for the grebe and not finding it. I left for a while to look for Kittiwakes at Sandy Hook (not found) and returned to look for it again, when I found it within 5 minutes in the early afternoon.

Not much else on the bay, a few Bufflehead, one Red-breasted Merganser, both loons, and a few fly-by Cormorants.

RSS for birding

Yahoo's Pipes site is obviously not the only way to handle RSS feeds for birding sites. Google's Reader is another one, and has the advantage of useful interfaces on smart-phones. So here are the RSS/Atom/XML links that I'm using for both Yahoo and Google:

eBirdsNYC: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/ebirdsnyc/rss
SINaturaList: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/SINaturaList/rss
BTBlue: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/btblue/rss
NYSBirds-L: http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.xml
NJBirds: https://lists.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=NJBirds&v=ATOM1.0
JerseyBirds: https://lists.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/wa?RSS&L=JerseyBi&v=ATOM1.0

Lots of programs can read RSS feeds, including browsers like Firefox. Yahoo groups offer RSS feeds by default. Princeton's LISTSERV-based RSS feeds seem to have problems with Yahoo's Pipes but work ok in Google's Reader. Other non-Yahoo lists may or may not offer RSS feeds and the HTML aggregate at birdingonthe.net doesn't either - so the coverage cannot be comprehensive.

Because of the issues with Princeton's RSS feed and Yahoo pipes I am using Google's Reader and the RSS feeds above to check lists "in the field".

NYC bird list postings aggregator

Experimenting with the Yahoo Pipes site I created an RSS aggregator based on the message archives of four NYC area birding lists (eBirdsNYC, SINaturaList, BTBlue, NYSBirds-L)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/philjeffrey/nycbirds1

Which, in a certain amount of duplication, also contains this blog (disabled for now until I can filter it more effectively).

Oct 12th, Central Park

Lured in by the prospect of an even better migration day than the previous one, I found I'd predicted the movement wrong and there was less volume than Oct 11th. However spending quite a time at Tanner's Spring did produce a slow trickle of warblers and a late-ish Red-eyed Vireo:

Wood Duck
Eastern Phoebe
Red-eyed Vireo
House Wren
Winter Wren
Hermit Thrush
Brown Thrasher
Northern Parula
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Palm Warbler
Blackpoll Warbler
American Redstart
Scarlet Tanager
Eastern Towhee
Chipping Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow

Oct 11th, Central Park

I was up at the North End of Central Park on Sunday looking for the Sedge Wren reported the previous day. There was a decent movement of late fall migrants, including many Yellow-rumped Warblers. One brief reported sighting of the Sedge Wren and then nothing else, so I left after a while. The Ramble was not that active, but of note was a tagged Monarch Butterfly (see pic) in the Maintenance Field. Other than that, a better than average fall migration day

American Kestrel
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Northern Flicker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue-headed Vireo
Brown Creeper
Winter Wren
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Swainson's Thrush
Hermit Thrush
Gray Catbird
Brown Thrasher
Cedar Waxwing
Nashville Warbler
Northern Parula
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Yellow-throated Warbler
Palm Warbler
Eastern Towhee
Chipping Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Lincoln's Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco

Central Park, Oct 6th

Not quite an epic day, but the best fall migration day for me of 2009 with good numbers of birds at Strawberry Fields at dawn (the benefit of getting the 0535 out of Princeton Jct) and birds continuing to drop in for at least another hour or more. Sparrows, woodpeckers, phoebe and kinglets dominated, with an unspectacular warbler diversity but I managed to eke out 13 warbler species (not bad for fall) but nearly all in the single digits for individuals. Species mix was mid-late fall, with both Swainson's and Wood Thrushes outnumbering the single Hermit Thrush and Red-eyed rather than Blue-headed Vireos.


Great Blue Heron
Gadwall (still 25+ at Turtle Pond)
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (several)
Northern Flicker (many)
Eastern Phoebe (several)
Red-eyed Vireo (3)
Winter Wren (3)
Golden-crowned Kinglet (many)
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Swainson's Thrush
Hermit Thrush
Wood Thrush
Gray Catbird
Brown Thrasher
Cedar Waxwing
Northern Parula
Magnolia Warbler
Black-throated Blue Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Black-throated Green Warbler
Pine Warbler (Turtle Pond)
Palm Warbler
Blackpoll Warbler
Black-and-white Warbler
American Redstart
Ovenbird
Northern Waterthrush
Common Yellowthroat
Scarlet Tanager
Eastern Towhee (several)
Song Sparrow
Lincoln's Sparrow (Maintenance Field)
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Indigo Bunting (Maint Field, Strawberry Fields)
Baltimore Oriole (1)