Jeff Ritter and I birded Kissena this cold but sunny morning to scope it out for next week's Queens CBC. It was relatively quiet but we saw some nice birds. At Kissena proper we started by flushing a couple of great horned owls at an undisclosed location. We found a winter wren kip, kipping along the eastern bridle path, ran into a flock of rusty blackbirds near the lake outflow with a purple finch nestled amongst them. After finding a pair of late eastern towhees, we discovered an orange crowned warbler on our way back to the velodrome lot. Here's a photo of him taking a dive off the top of a vine behind the ballfields: Orange crowned diving off a vine at Kissena Park
| | | | | | | | | | | Orange crowned diving off a vine at Kissena Park Explore warblerwave's photos on Flickr. warblerwave has uploaded 351 photos to Flickr. | | | Next we headed to the Kissena corridor. We had not birded there for a while, what with the eastern section terribly overgrown. Even without leaves today it was still pretty poor habitat. However in the westen section we were rewarded with a birding trifecta, a second orange crowned, a nashville warbler and a Lincoln sparrow (clearly a manifestation of Jeff's Lincoln magnetism). Finally we hit the secret warbler spot near the golf course where we finished up with a trio of hermit thrushes. All in all a very nice morning of winter birding. (Though this really puts the pressure on for next week's CBC. Oh well. What will be, will be). Wishing you good birds, Peter -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
