My son Tilden and I decided spontaneously to chase the Pink-footed Goose on Tuesday evening. I was quite shocked to find only one other birder along East Road at 6:30 PM. We didn't find the rare goose; maybe we just missed it, or maybe it left with the hundreds of Canada Geese that flew north from the marsh before dusk. But we had more than our share of other redeeming sightings.
* BALD EAGLES tending their nest in the woods at Mud Lock * AMERICAN KESTRELS and NORTHERN HARRIERS all along our route * One blue-morph SNOW GOOSE among a few white ones, plus a TUNDRA SWAN among expected duck species at Knox-Marsellus * Probably the greatest spectacle of birds I've ever seen in the Basin or maybe anywhere - hundreds of thousands of RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS and COMMON GRACKLES passing by the tower at Tschache Pool at sunset. Several hundred settled in the trees and marsh grasses right by the parking area, but most flew past May's Point toward the Wildlife Drive. We saw at least ten dense flocks of many hundreds of birds, stretching and folding like some genius animator's abstract inventions. But most impressive was a single line of blackbirds starting from the northwest to the southeast horizons, passing at a rate of at least 100 per second and sometimes bulging to maybe several hundred. This flock passed without pause for at least ten minutes -- we timed it with a watch. The line mostly flowed smoothly like a stream in its channel, but occasionally rose and fell in a resonant wave, as if whip-snapped by a giant hand miles away. I'll sit down and develop a more rigorous calculation before we enter data in eBird, but I am pretty sure that there were several hundred thousand birds, mostly Red-winged Blackbirds. Tilden would like to believe that there were at least a million, and I think even this could well be accurate. * A GREAT HORNED OWL that passed over Route 89 at dusk, making me look smart seconds after I told Tilden to look for one. We took note of the bird's very flat-headed and nearly concave-bellied profile, which seemed counterintuitive given our accustomed image of the perched bird, with its big face and hefty body. Mark Chao -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
