Prompted by a call from Shai Mitra about the massive Red-throated Loon flight taking place out east I ran down to Fort Tilden (Fisherman's Parking Lot at the west end of Tilden) to seawatch this morning. When I got there a bit before 9 AM I was surprised to see virtually no Red-throated Loons (RTLO) flying by!! Through my 2.5 hours staring at the ocean I did observe 106 RTLO, but considering the Mega flights that happened to the east of me at Robert Moses State Park and to the south of me at the Avalon Seawatch in New Jersey (They had over 16,000 breaking the previous single day record (incidentally set last year on this exact date) by about 40%) this total was very interesting/disappointing. It would seem that the bulk of the RTLOs cut the corner and jump off somewhere around Point Lookout or farther east and make a straight line for the northern coast of New Jersey. A little more evidence of this was that just a few miles to the east at Riis Park there was a slightly heavier, but still not amazing, flight that was extremely far offshore, with many RTLOs almost at the limit of conjecture.
Consolations for the lack of an epic RTLO flight were one each of Razorbill and Parasitic Jaeger, both heading west. The latter was an immature undergoing conspicuous inner primary molt. Also of note were 370+ Bonaparte's Gulls, and 346 Laughing Gulls. The latter strikes me as a very high number to be around this time of year. The bulk of both of these counts were of birds actually heading East, mostly towards an offshore feeding frenzy, so they're not getting out of town quite yet. Bonaparte's Gulls are around the Rockaway Inlet/New York Bay area in very large numbers right now, with the number seen off Tilden today being a vast under-representation of birds that are in the area. Other counts of westbound waterbirds were as follows: ~240 Black Scoters, 14 Surf Scoters, 12 White-winged Scoters, 480 Dark-winged Scoter sp., 90 Scoter sp., 14 Red-breasted Merganser, 23 Long-tailed Ducks, 1 Horned Grebe, 4 Mallards, 15 American Black Ducks, 13 Brant, 1 Scaup sp., and a bunch of waterfowl too far out to come close to identifying. Notable was the almost complete absence of Northern Gannets, as compared to the several thousand that had been around at least as recently as Friday. I didn't spend much time looking behind me at passerines, but birds heading westbound near the beach included 21 American Pipits (2,2,1,1,1,1,7,4,1,1), a Purple Finch, and 35 American Goldfinches (1,10,1,22,1). At Floyd Bennett Field, I found an adult Ross's Goose in a flock of about 85 Canada Geese at roughly these coordinates: 40.591519,-73.896039 The Goose continued as of dusk according to subsequent observers. There was a perched juvenile Red-shouldered Hawk just north of there in the North 40 as well. Good Birding -Doug Gochfeld. Brooklyn, NY. -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES 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://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
