Weeks 39-48 Paul's Update

I have recently been on a sabbatical from birding. This isn't really by choice but instead largely due to the end of the Fall term, several over-lapping proposal deadlines, and other somewhat trivial, time-consuming job related responsibilities. Despite all of that, I have been able to continue my birding activities, albeit with a lower intensity.

As this lull coincides with the onset of the long Canadian winter, my birding results have been somewhat sparse. In the past two months, I managed to see only 2 new species. One was a warbler flitting through the treetops in early October before all of the warblers left by the end of that month. The other bird was a Common Gallinule (or as previously referred to- the moorhen) which was seen on Lake Ontario during a short road trip with my parents.

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of October 1 - November 30

Yeah, we missed posting last months monthly birds, but it would have been a bit boring anyway. I got six total for October, with most of them ones that I should have gotten earlier in the year. But November was a different story!

I won't go into stories of my adventures too much, but November was a mix of getting birds I should have gotten in the winter plus a few rare birds that I chased down, including me finally tracking down a Snowy Owl.

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of September 1 - September 30

Yep, we've not been posting weekly updates, but here is a monthly one! And while new birds haven't been coming fast and heavy like in the spring, I still did pretty damn well.

One thing I did do was I started to use eBird more. Like every single time I go birding. Ever since I got the BirdLog app working (we both will review it soon enough) I have found it easier to use that to log my birds than to keep sparse and inconsistent notes in my notebook. It also helped me figure out that I forgot to write down a bird in my list book, but an hour or so later of double checking (yes, I wasn't going to stop until I figured it out) and I noticed that while I mention it in my post about Nummy Island, I don't actually record Clapper Rail in my list of birds for the year. Yay, free bird!

Weeks 35-38 Paul's Update

I am having trouble keeping up my birding updates, though it shouldn't really be that hard to write a bit on my birding and tally up what I have recently seen. But I look up, and then I am nearly a month behind on the posts. Maybe this is ok because I find that I write my most interesting birding adventures into separate posts anyways. So now I will be posting every month on my recent progress. And each of these will be a nice summary of the birds and the seasonal changes.

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of August 18 - August 31

I was NOT shut out!

Weeks 33 and 34 Paul's Update

Another late and short summary of my birding efforts in August.

Weeks 31 and 32 Paul's Update (Summer Birding)

The strange thing I find about writing two-week updates on birding activity is that tends to group very different birding activities together. Of course, birding has been slower this summer so I don't have much really to write about the past two weeks. Looking at my list, I guess that's not entirely true as I saw 7 new species over this time period.

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of August 4 - August 17

Previously I mentioned that birding was slow up in the Philly region so I headed down to Cape May, and boy am I glad I did! I spent every morning for the week getting up at 5:30 so I can head down and put a good many hours of birding before my family was even awake. The best way to not feel guilty for spending so much time birding while on vacation with your family? Sacrifice sleep! Ok, I did go to be early every night, so my sleep didn't suffer.

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of July 21 - August 3

Yeah, summer is slow and we slow down with our weekly reports so that they are every-other week, only we put an extra week into that. But, hey, both of us have plenty of birds to report for these weeks!

Weeks 29 and 30 Paul's Update (Oregon)

I realized a couple days ago that I neglected to post my last two week update, but Damon didn't post his on time either so I don't feel too bad about it. But looking back, I do have some birding to report over the past few weeks!

Damon's Birds for the Weeks of July 7 - July 20

Ok, I don't quite have the neat stories as Paul (no trips to New Scotland, no pelagic birds) and I haven't been to Cape May during this last couple of weeks, but I did get a new bird each of the weeks!

Weeks 28 and 29 Paul's Update (Nova Scotia)

As Damon mentioned, now that birding has slowed down in the heat of the summer, we are posting every other week updates. I could have posted one last week but it would have been fairly short, and besides that I was on vacation looking for new birds.

And I did find new birds because we went to Nova Scotia and kicked around the Southern Shore for a few days. As it is on the coast and has different habitats, this made it fairly easy to track down a new bird or two. Nova Scotia is also fairly "boreal" giving it some more northerly birds as well. It also helped that we went on a whale-watching boat ride, which was actually a bird-watching trip for me (more on this later).

Damon's Birds for the Week of June 30 - July 6

Ok, we are back to normal programming, and I am back to not being shutout!

So after not seeing any new birds the previous week, despite desperately searching for both local cuckoos, I knew I had to change tactics. And by "change tactics" I meant "take another weekend trip down to Cape May"! Oh, let me tell you, Independence Day is not the time to go to the shore. Yeah, I've been there many times over the years, but I've never had traffic quite that bad down there as this year's fourth of July weekend. It was bad.

But it wasn't bad when  you get up early in the morning to go driving to Cape May. The first day down there was the Friday after the 4th so there were no birding walks in the morning, so instead I just wandered around Cape May Point by myself. And, oh the terns!

Damon's Birds for the Week of June 23 - June 29

I tried this week.

I started the week in southern New Jersey, including a morning trip by myself to Cape May Point to go birding. I saw lots of neat birds (more later), but the 'new' birds on that trip were ones I had seen the previous day.  It really is a nice place, and the walk in the trails was great, so I wasn't complaining. Still, at least show me a skimmer!

Week 26 Paul's Update (Carden Alvar)

We are now half way through the year and I can't believe its already July. The past few months have really been whirlwind of birds and stuff. But something I never imagined during the cold and bleak days of winter is that there is a summertime lull in the birding. Now, I didn't get shut out this week but my opportunities to see new bird species are certainly becoming narrower. Perhaps I will have to take another trip soon to some exotic birding paradise. Anyways, I have been slowing down my birding and making fewer trips afield.

Damon's Birds for the Week of June 16 - Jun 22

I am very happy because today is one of those summer days where those great loud thunderstorms come through. They always make me feel like home. Not that we didn't have storms like this in Kentucky, and Arizona certainly did have their monsoon storms blow through, but the east coast summer storms that can pop up through any afternoon are just somewhat different. Maybe it is the feel in the high humidity, or maybe it is the way the thunder rolls through the sky, but it reminds me of listening to it bounce off the buildings through my courtyard facing window in college.

The storms were moving in from the west, not south, so it is unlikely that they would bring many birds with them (I can always hope for a raven blown in form Appalachia though). But I always look outside, just in case we have some different visitor bird hunker down in my yard after the winds pick up. And I did find one! Ok, after watching for a few minutes I saw it was just a Song Sparrow, but it is always good to challenge yourself to find a bird that at first is only some leaf movement.

The tree of the Song Sparrow just minutes after I saw it

Also the Song Sparrow was moving and flying a bit differently than they normally do, so it got me hoping that it was some fun exotic bird. I guess the sighting of a Tropical Kingbird in Philadelphia gets me thinking like that.

Yeah, about that Tropical Kingbird? I am totally going to go and try to find it, but I heard about it on Saturday morning and then I was gone in New Jersey until today and then worked today. Now whether to get up early and try to beat the traffic or wait until my youngest takes a nap?

Week 25 Paul's Update (Lynde Conservative Area)

I broke one of my longest no birding periods (a birding fast if you will) with a short outing on Friday at Lynde Shores Conservative Area in Ajax, Ontario. My spouse was flying into Pearson Airport and I had volunteered to pick her up and, seeing that I was headed into Toronto anyways, why not stop by a conservation area near the lake for a while? I took a quick look at eBird to see what I might find and there was a recent report of Purple Gallinule, Black-billed Cuckoos, and a Red-necked Grebe at Lynde Conservation Area. I hadn't been to this particular conservation area before, but it looked like a nice place for a morning walk with a mix of woods, open shrubby grassland, and a large marsh all set on the shore of Lake Ontario.

Week 24 Paul's Update (Bluebird)

I have only one bird to report on this week. My Dad and his friend, Doug, took me fishing last Sunday on Unity Reservoir. Doug drove the boat (Thanks Doug!) and my Dad kept baiting my hook (Thanks Dad!) and I spent several hours fishing and looking for birds.

It was a really nice morning. We saw grebes and hoards of swallows. There were a few duck fly-overs (mallards), geese in the distance, and a merganser or two as well. To top it off, we saw an Osprey, a Bald Eagle, a Red-tailed Hawk, and an American Kestrel. We might have even seen some Turkey Vultures!. There was also an eagle fly-over that had me thinking Golden Eagle for a few moments before we decided it was a juvenile baldy. But alas, there were no new birds until I got back to shore and found a bird box. "Who is living here?" was my first thought, and soon an incredibly blue bird emerged. I don't mean a vibrantly blue bird, but instead one that was blue all over. It was clearly a Mountain Bluebird.

Damon's Birds for the Week of June 9 - June 15

After the type of week Paul had last week, I knew I had to do something to kick myself back into competition, so this week I took a quick trip down to south Florida to pick up a bunch of birds. Oh, wait, no, I still am stuck in the Mid-Atlantic, but at least I got down to Maryland to mix it up!

I was feeling good too, because just from a small stroll around the neighborhood and my drive down to Maryland I saw 29 species of birds. Note, I wasn't actually birding, just going around my neighborhood and driving on the highways. Granted, none of them were new, but there were some oddities of the list like me not seeing any Red-tailed Hawks on my trip (but dozens of Osprey) and my brother questioning my Tree Swallow identification in the twilight of the Eastern Shore of Maryland (he would not write it down in my book).

Damon's Birds for the Week of June 2 - June 8

Holy crap, I will not even compare my week to Paul's. It is summertime here (not quite summer yet, but summertime at least) and the migrations have already passed through, so except for a few rare straggler birds everything is pretty much boring here in terms of new birds. So basically I have three activities I can do:

1) Try to soak up the last few birds that I should have gotten already.
2) Go to new locales to find birds that are not in the Delaware Valley.
3) Go chasing after rare birds as they pop up on eBird.

Ok, I tried #3 earlier this week. Yeah. Paul is doing #2 now and dropped an insurmountable lead on me unless I actually get to travel this year. But his trips are only a few and only every now and then, so it isn't like he is actively using that strategy for new birds. So this week I got to just look around my normal haunts for birds that are here but I just haven't seen yet. And, hey, I got three! If I get three birds a week around my  normal haunts this summertime I will be happy.