Hello All,
I am really not trying to compete with Ken Rosenberg for reporting
neat birds (sorry, Ken, I couldn’t resist), but it just takes me a while to sit
down at my computer to let other folks know about my experiences. Anyway...
perhaps the coolest birds I saw Saturday were a GOLDEN EAGLE and a NELSON’S
SPARROW.
I was birding an area that overlaps substantially (or even entirely)
with Tom Schulenberg’s home patch. If you put a dot at the intersection of
Freese and Hanshaw Roads northeast of Ithaca, and draw a circle of about a mile
radius around it, you get the picture of where I was birding. Besides
encompassing my own residence, I like this circle because it includes patches
of woods (some rather contiguous with others allowing for some substantial
amount of forested habitat from early successional stages up to woods that
might be have at least 60-70 years worth of growth). It also has agricultural
fields (corn and soybean in particular) that have recently been harvested and
are attracting lots of waterfowl and loafing gulls. It includes the Freese
Road garden plots and similar grassy and old field habitats. It also includes
a section of Fall Creek, the little pond at Liddel Bee Lab and the wetlands at
the Lab of Ornithology.
I set out Saturday about 9am with the express purpose of trying to
see if the NELSON’S SPARROW was still hanging around the little pond by the bee
lab on Freese Road. It had been reported just the day before, so I thought
there was a good chance that I might run into it if I was careful and
persistent. I have to admit that I did look for this bird with my sons the day
that Tom first reported it (it is only a half mile from my house). I thought
my fledgling birder boys might enjoy trying to see a bird that they had never
encountered before. I am fairly certain that I got two glimpses of the bird
with enough diagnostic field marks to say that I saw the bird that day, but the
only looks my boys got were of a small brownish bird, twice jumping up out of
the tall dead grass, flying about ten feet, and diving back into cover.
So, yesterday I headed straight to the pond area. It is becoming
fairly easy to see where others are looking for the bird because of the human
foot prints in the mud and the little paths that are now meandering through the
tall, dead grass. I really didn’t want to put on a one-man drive through the
grass in an attempt to flush the bird for a quick view. So, I surveyed the
area from a little distance and decided to walk in to the bank of the pond and
sit against one of the bluebird/tree swallow boxes to see if I could hear or
see this sparrow without flushing it.
Of course I ended up flushing birds just getting to the bluebird/tree
swallow box. One of these was a largish sparrow with a longish, more or less
rounded tail, that seemed relatively dark on the top side (do you like my
scientific descriptions?). Perhaps a lingering SONG SPARROW. Another bird was
smaller, plumper, but not fat, and not interested in flushing nearly as far as
the first bird (which went well over 40 yards before diving back into cover).
This second bird only would go about five to eight feet before hiding again.
This bird decidedly was not the Nelson’s sparrow, however, as I did see it well
enough to know it had a very clean, unmarked throat and breast, and a mostly
unmarked face, with a couple, broad brownish stripes on its head, and a
light-colored bill. The rational birder in me was saying to pay attention to
the fact that it is mid November, and that this must be a juvenile
White-crowned sparrow. But the guy looking at the bird through 10x binoculars
at about 12 feet, kept saying that this bird is way too small and simply not
the right proportions. Plus, the face, including the entire area around the
eyes and auriculars was unmarked in my view of the bird. This birder in me
kept asking the question, why can’t this be a really late Field Sparrow?
American Tree Sparrow also jumped into the rational side of my brain, and the
shape and size of this bird was much more similar to that than a White-crowned
for sure. Still, the bill was all one shade of light (not two-toned like the
rational birder in me would expect with a Tree Sparrow), and I did have a
decent, straight-on (albeit brief) view of the breast, and saw nothing that
looked remotely like a breast spot. The inquisitive trait in me certainly was
piqued with this bird, but certainly was not ”peaked” in that I never felt like
I was satisfied with figuring out what that bird really was. A second sparrow
spp. in my notebook.
I flushed a third sparrow just getting to the place I wanted to sit
down to watch. This little lighter brownish job (LLBJ) also only went about 10
feet at grass-top level before diving back into cover. I couldn’t really
notice anything else about this bird at the time. So, I sat down to watch and
listen.
There was plenty to keep my attention. Small flocks of blackbirds
(mostly RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS, with a few BROWN-HEADED COWBIRDS mixed in) were
flying from north to south and then some coming back north again. Over the
almost square patch of woods to the west of this area, I saw a female AMERICAN
KESTREL mobbing and rolling with a SHARP-SHINNED HAWK. At different times,
from one to four of the local AMERICAN CROWS would take offense to one of local
RED-TAILED HAWKS perched nearby.
At one point about 15 twenty minutes into my sit, I heard a sharp,
repeated call note approaching from above and behind me. I turned around and
found the bird in my binoculars. It was fun to watch it come closer and
ultimately land in a little bush just ten feet behind me. This was without any
doubt, a juvenile WHITE-CROWNED SPARROW. I watched this bird in the bush for
about a full minute until it flew to a different bush. I feel like I got a
good handle on its overall shape, and although it’s shape obviously changed as
it altered it’s posture in the bush, it simply could not hide the fact that it
is a relatively big, chunky, and longish sparrow. This clearly was not the
kind of sparrow as the second one I described above.
At that point, I had not really seen or heard anything in the grass
in front of me. So, I decided to move on. You can guess what happened. I
took just one step, and a sparrow flew up from in front of me, flew about seven
feet, and landed on top of a little forb of some sort. I got a really good
look at it in profile for about 15 seconds. A small compact sparrow, with a
shortish tail. Most striking was the orange wash on its breast, face, and even
the undertones of its back feathers. Substantial dark streaking on the orange
breast, dark auriculars compared to the orange face, and thick stripes on its
crown. The last thing that seared into my brain before the bird jumped down
into the thick over of dead grass was that its bill was decidedly
un-sparrow-like. It really reminded me of a meadowlark bill (and no, this was
not a meadowlark!), sort of thick but long and pointed, not conical at all.
This really helped to accentuate a flat-headed appearance of the bird. Think
of a field sparrow or American tree sparrow with their rounded heads and little
conical bills that come off of that round ball that is their head. The
NELSONS’S SPARROW has a really flat headed look, and then add this thick-based,
but long, pointed bill to it and it gave a very different impression.
The inquisitive part of me was very satisfied with that observation.
Despite the fact that others found the bird and had reported it (Thanks, Tom!),
I felt my own sense of discovery because I felt like I learned something new
about a bird I had seen very, very infrequently before. I walked on with a
smile on my face.
I was still relishing the experience only about 50 yards further on,
when my subconscious mind started asking me what that BLUE JAY was squawking
about. I glanced to the north, and there only about 100 yards directly over my
house (about a half mile away) I saw a huge, dark bird showing a slight
dihedral as it soared/half glided into the south wind. Even at a half mile it
was clear that it was no turkey vulture. The only question was which eagle it
was.
The eagle closed the gap fairly quickly, and even flapped once or
twice in the half mile between my house and where I was standing. When I first
put binoculars on it, I could see a lot of sunlight reflecting off the feathers
on the top of the head of the GOLDEN EAGLE. The bird ended up flying about 50
yards west of me and about 75 yards up. I could clearly see a diffuse patching
look to its underwing and undertail areas. Not white patches as in a juvenile,
but just the lighter patterns that occur still on older birds. It’s flight
feathers looked to me like a combination of a couple ages -- some brand new
feathers and some older ones. I think it likely was a second year bird
although it is possible it was older.
When it passed at it’s closest it turned it’s head right toward me on
the ground. Through my binoculars, I almost felt like I could see my own
reflection in the glint of it’s eye. In his book “Birders: Tales of a Tribe,”
author Mark Cocker writes about moments like this. At least for some people,
there is both the act of recognition (I know what the species is) and also an
increasing sense of awareness and awe that you and this one bird have
intersected while the bird is on an epic migration journey. Cocker describes
this as his sense of discovery. It is as much about discovering something
about yourself as it is in discovering the presence of a bird that isn’t common
or abundant locally.
There are lots of different kinds of birds out there. And, there are
lots of different kinds of birders. It’s fun discovering both kinds of
diversity.
Jody Enck
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