Thursday, September 17, 2009

Northern Wheatear, DeKorte Park, Lyndhurst NJ

Northern Wheatear is moderately common in Britain so I've seen a bunch of them, but only one previously in the US - a quick look at the often-elusive Smith Point Park bird on 9/22/01. So even though I had seen one in GB on 9/11 I went looking for the DeKorte Park bird, finding it relatively quickly and getting good looks at what appears on the face of it to be a first fall immature of the Greenland ssp. This is the first time I've birded the impoundments at DeKorte and there were a good number of shorebirds present. Predominantly Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs there were also Least and Semipalmated Sandpipers, Pectoral and Stilt Sandpipers, Semipalmated and a single juvenile American Golden Plover. Not bad for a morning, and a Northern Harrier was over the phragmites on the way out.

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