Northern LapwingS

Northern Lapwings at a distance - record shot only

An unprecedented fall-out of Northern Lapwings has occurred in the north-east with between 5 and 11 individuals being spotted - it depends on your philosophy about how related individual sightings are, and my own suspicion is that there have to be more than this since Lapwings are fond of farm fields where they are not always obvious to birders passing by.   The current sightings are summarized in this piece on the ABA blog.  The nearest Lapwing population is Iceland, and I assume they head south-east in fall to Britain for winter.  Most European Lapwings head south-west in response to harsh weather.

I birded Central Park on Sunday morning (Nov 11th) and drove into NYC with the strategy that if the Lapwings were re-found I'd head out to Montauk.  Central Park had a modest finch flight, so I had Pine Siskins and Purple Finches but alas not the elusive White-winged Crossbills or Evening Grosbeaks.  More conventional early winter species like Ruby-crowned Kinglet, White-crowned Sparrow and quite a few Hermit Thrushes were around.  Much of the Ramble was closed off for post-storm tree clean-up (both Sandy and the following week's Nor'easter had an impact on the park).

Then I saw an email reporting the Lapwings and I was back in the car by 10am.

The Midtown Tunnel had  re-opened just the previous Friday after being flooded by Sandy so after leaving Manhattan the first part of the trip was speedy (L.I.E., Rt. 27/Sunrise Highway).  But the problem with Montauk - and the reason I rarely go there any more - is that the next 35 miles are a tortuous wind through Southampton, Bridgehampton, Easthampton, Amagansett and other picturesque towns with very low speed limits.  There's a couple of fantasy 55mph zones near Montauk but most of the time you're closer to 35mph, which is about half the speed you were doing to for the last hour+.

Nevertheless, I made it out the east side of Montauk and to Deep Hollow Ranch (aka Theodore Roosevelt County Park) and found the Northern Lapwings without a problem.  This location is where I saw both Barnacle and Pink-footed Geese in 2007. Here's where it got both surreal and mundane.  I've seen thousands of Lapwings in Britain where they are relatively common on arable land, but it was a species I'd never really anticipated seeing in the United States, much less two of them hanging out together.  I had spent the preceding morning (Saturday) looking for the Lapwing that had been reported near Allentown NJ on Thursday with no success.  Lapwings look quite exotic to American birders, with the irridescence, crest and face pattern, but less so to Brits like me.  However Lapwings as a family are often quite spectacular in plumage.

Much of the time these Lapwings were distant and somewhat wary, being flushed by a passing Red-tailed Hawk (which looks pretty similar to the Common Buzzard, Buteo buteo if you're a prey species) or people on horseback.  So I did see them in flight and their relaxed flight style on broad wings belies the fact that these birds are long-distance migrants in Europe.  Which explains how they made it this far in the first place - something like a Greenfinch would splash down in the Atlantic from exhaustion.

The ABA blog for Hurricane Sandy also speculates that this amazing Lapwing event is correlated with a high pressure system that was present over the north Atlantic Ocean.  It's stretching the correlation to beyond breaking point to suggest that the Lapwings were related to Hurricane Sandy - but if their simulations are right one of the weather systems that led Sandy to turn westward and make landfall in NJ are the same weather systems that made quite a few Lapwings make landfall in the USA.  It just wasn't Sandy that did it.

Update: as of December 8th the one Lapwing on mainland MA and the two on Nantucket Island are still present, the two Montauk birds have long since left, and there was a fleeting report of one in Virginia.  Likely all of them are still on the east coast, but there's a lot of farm land out there.

Hermit Warbler

A Hermit Warbler was found by Vinny Pellegrino at Sunken Meadow State Park on Long Island on Saturday afternoon - a first state record that looks good for the species and remains only to be duly anointed by the records committee. I made a special trip on the very early morning of Wednesday to make it through NYC before the worst of rush hour and reach the park at dawn. Took me only a little while to find the warbler, and then I spent a little while photographing it.

This Hermit Warbler is especially significant because of a hybrid Townsend's X Hermit Warbler found at Jones Beach on Thanksgiving 2002 that I (amongst others) photographed and was the subject of quite a lot of discussion. NYSARC finally decided it was probably a hybrid and not a pure Hermit Warbler and so Hermit Warbler was not on the NY State list. Until now. The 2010 bird is gray-backed, lacks yellow in the vent (excludes Black-throated Green) and has a diffusely pale gray breast and flank. It appears to be a first fall female - the primary and retrix shape certainly indicates a first fall bird. The yellow eye ring is quite striking, as is the swath of yellow on the face - the slightly greener auricular patch is clearly limited to below a line from the bill through the eye which gives it quite a different pattern to Townsend's or Black-throated Greens which have larger auricular patches. This bird looks like it has a huge yellow supercilium by comparison. There's no evidence of Townsend's Warbler genes in it, short of capturing it and sequencing it to be totally certain.

And since this is merely birding, I don't think that sort of bird stress is ever justified just to fulfill curiosity.

Vagrancy being the mother of invention, this little warbler was seen feeding on the short grass along the northern edge of the park, in a manner that is quite atypical of other similar Dendroica warblers. Hermit belongs to the family of obviously closely-related warblers: Black-throated Green Warbler, Golden-cheeked Warbler, Townsend's Warbler and Hermit Warbler. Three of these species prefer evergreens to feed in, but Golden-cheeked breeds in Juniper-Oak habitat. Given the Hermit Warbler preference for conifers it's all the stranger for it to be feeding out in the open on grass, but I presume this is where the insects are and there's more of interest there than there is in the heavier cover. One of my photographs shows a very small insect on the tip of the warbler's bill - sub-millimeter size.

The Jones Beach Hermit hybrid was also a terrestrial bird, feeding amongst the ornamental kale/cabbages, which made for an interesting photographic backdrop.

Having seen a couple of females briefly on migration in AZ in late May in the company of migrating Townsend's, it was good to finally be able to take time to study one up close for an extended period, and be pretty sure I've seen a pure Hermit.

It's turning out to be quite a good rarity season (I've not seen either Ash-throated or Western Kingbird this fall, but they've been reported from NYC).

Update: this was apparently the last day the Hermit was seen - the following day it was absent, but a Merlin and a Cat were in the general area. I saw a falcon (probably the same Merlin) hunting the edge on Wednesday also. Wednesday night was also the coldest night of late, getting down into the low 20's F. Not a hospitable environment for a small vagrant warbler. It was not reported subsequently, and unfortunately that suggests that it succumbed to the elements.