This evening Joann and I drove the Montezuma Wildlife drive. At 5:15 a flock of at least 80 Brant flew south fairly low, east of the drive and parallel to the river. 15 minutes later 17 Greater Yellowlegs followed the same path. A nice group of at least 300 Ring-necked Ducks were in the open water on the main pool with 1 Redhead mixed in.
We arrived at Benning Marsh where the Ibises were right along the shoreline in the grassy edge amazingly undisturbed by the cars 30 feet away. Not claiming to be experts on Ibis ID we pretty quickly agreed with Jay McGowan's thoughts on one being White-faced and the other being Glossy. In fact, if the sure White-faced wasn't there to influence the thought process the other would certainly be called a Glossy by its field marks. For those on Genesee birds you can find Jay's photos from his Cayuga Birds post here: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9NPknoBf_dNMm5m0KXduidMTjNZETYmyPJy0li ipFm0?feat=drectlink. Moving on to Knox-Marcellus Marsh at sunset things had changed a lot since Doug Daniels' post from the morning. We quickly found 2 Hudsonian Godwits among the 40 Greater and 1 Lesser Yellowlegs along with 15 Dunlin. The Snow Goose flock just got up and flew toward the potato fields so we could not look for the Ross's Goose. The pelicans were there but "only" 7 Sandhill Cranes. The Trumpeter Swan numbers had grown to10 and we watched the dozen Great Egrets fly off toward Tschache pool. Thanks for sharing your photos Jay (We hope cross-posting the link was okay)! Mike and Joann Tetlow _____ I am using the Free version of SPAMfighter <http://www.spamfighter.com/len> . SPAMfighter has removed 446 of my spam emails to date. Do you have a slow PC? <http://www.spamfighter.com/SLOW-PCfighter?cid=sigen> Try a free scan! -- 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/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/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/ --