Avoidance tactics

here's looking at you, kid

So I guess I'll just go on blogging about birds as if nothing's happened.

Speaking of avoidance mechanisms, I made my usual trek up to Randall's Island on the day of the NY Marathon. I live east of First Avenue, so if I don't get out of the area before 8:30am on Marathon Sunday, I'm pretty much stuck there until late afternoon unless I walk a couple of miles each way to get in and out of the area.

Song Sparrow watches out

The north end of the island was pretty quiet. The first few Brants have arrived for the winter, and there were a lot of Song Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows. The Song Sparrows were pretty cooperatve.

landscape with Savannah Sparrow

I followed a group of Savannah Sparrows north along the eastern shore. They were a bit less approachable than the Songs.

inclined to fly

I did get a couple of decent photos of them anyway. The usual gulls were around. Mostly Ring-Billeds and mostly distant, but there was a Herring Gull on the rocks on the shore.

curious Herring Gull

There were a few Laughing Gulls in their winter plumage. I don't recall seeing many in the county so late in the year before, though eBird didn't blink at them. I didn't succeed in turning any of them into more unusual species.

who's laughing now?

The little freshwater wetlands across Central Road from Icahn Stadium was also quiet. There were a couple of late migrants: a Black-Throated Blue Warbler skulking around the underbrush, and a Monarch Butterfly in the flower garden just south of the marsh.

Monarch of all et cetera

It looks like they're putting in another water feature in the wetlands area, and also they seem to have completed a bike/pedestrian path just east of the marsh, right outside the wastewater treatment plant. I look forward to seeing what's up back there on a later visit.

Not much was doing at the Little Hell Gate saltmarsh: a few Mallards and one Black Duck, a few sparrows, and along the southern path, several Golden-Crowned Kinglets very active in a tree.

ready for takeoff

In the next tree sat a single tired-looking Ruby Crowned Kinglet.

contemplative Kinglet

Along the River's Edge Garden )between Little Hell Gate and the Ward's Island pedestrian bridge) there were a few more Savannah Sparrows, and one Black Capped Chickadee who scolded me vigorously while feeding.

hungry but talkative

The Marathon was still going when I got back to First Avenue. Up in that area, the crowd was much thinner than in my neighborhood, but there were some spectators.

watching the race

Things I haven't seen

Almost every time I go out birding, I see things I haven't seen before. Memorial Day weekend was particularly rich.

On Saturday, I went up to Randall's Island for the first time in a couple of months. It wasn't terribly productive, but there was a Killdeer at the salt marsh on the north shore of the island. That's not too unusual, but its behavior was not what I'm used to seeing.

The Kildeers I've seen there are usually transients and quiet; this one was calling constantly, as befits its scientific name (Charadrius vociferus, which is Latin for "loudmouth plover"). The call wasn't the killdeer that given it its common name, but a several long high peeps followed by a descending series of short notes.

And then it flew off the rocks in the saltmarsh to the baseball field, ran several steps, and flung itself in the infield dirt with one wing stretched out.

distraction

A distraction display! I'd never seen one. It must have a nest in the marsh area. I hope that works out OK, but between the starlings, the grackles, and the gulls, I'm a little dubious.

There was also a Laughing Gull, my first of the year, hanging out with some Ring-Billed Gulls on the outfield of another baseball diamond, and giving me a good view.

gull, Laughing and loafing

Sunday was a glorious day to be out in Central Park, but not if you were a starling who got a little too close to this Black-Crowned Night Heron.

nature red in tooth and claw

I've seen herons eat baby birds before, but this was a full-sized adult, and he had a great deal of trouble swallowing it. He eventually got it down, but looked quite saturnine afterward.

Monday I made an excursion to the northern part of Central Park. at the Pool (about 103rd street on the west side), I saw ... um, well. I saw two male Mallards mating.

well, I never!

I see from Teh Google that this is not rare, but I had never seen it before. It was clearly mating behavior, and not fighting, because they did the typical head-bobbing display at each other before one ducked down in the water and the other mounted.

Things were pretty quiet otherwise. Up at the the compost area on The Mount, where sometimes shorebirds stop off to browse in the ditches, there was a family of House Wrens with just-fledged young begging for food.

baby House Wren

Thinking about it, I don't recall ever seeing baby wrens before.

Back downtown in the Ramble, there's a Warbling Vireo nest. It's one of many in the park this year, but it's unusual in being clearly visible from the ground and not too high up. So with luck I'll have several weeks of rare views of Vireos raising their young.

Warbling vireo on nest

The male sings constantly while taking his turn on the nest, by the way. Quite charming. Also, those are spiderwebs all over the outside of the nest--an excellent structural material. Many thanks to Martin Sandler for pointing out the nest. Although it's fairly out in the open, I still would never have spotted it myself.

Far from the madding crowd, not close enough to the maddening gull

Saturday, after the rain, I was finally able to go out to Randall's Island for the first time in weeks. I was looking for a little orangy bird, Nelson's Sparrow, that had been sighted in the salt marsh on the northern tip of the island. The last report was of three birds on Monday the 6th.

I had no luck with the Nelson's. At the west end of the marsh were many Swamp Sparrows, some Song Sparrows, a few Common Yellowthroats. A hundred or so yards away, at the other end, a group of Savannah Sparrows jumped in and out of the bushes onto the grass and back in.

After a couple of times back and forth along the marsh, I continued around the northeast shore. Three more Savannah Sparrows seemed to follow me around. Sometimes I flushed them, sometimes they flew past me and led me up the shore.

It was quiet. The solitude was wonderful. Almost nobody was ever in sight. two joggers, once, and a man walking a dog.

There is a small hill at the south east end of this area, past the ball fields and jest before the fire department training area. I sat on a bench at the top of the hill for a while. When I want down the hill, a Kestrel flew past me and perched on a lamppost at the top.

industrial Kestrel

Just then, a couple with two dogs started up the hill, the first people I'd seen in an hour. I got my camera ready.

it was time to hunt anyway

I didn't think the Kestrel would care for them. Besides, it was time to hunt. I went back to the salt marsh.

There was still no sign of unusual sparrows. I waited a long time. As I got ready to leave, I scanned the opposite shore of the Bronx Kill, and noticed a rather small, slim gull, much smaller than the Herring and Ring-Billed Gulls nearby.

on shore, left to right:  Herring, mystery gull, Ring-Billed.  In the water, juvenile, probably a Herring

That was interesting. I'm not good at gulls, but I didn't think we had any small white-headed gulls. Maybe it was some kind of tern?

maddening gull

Not a tern surely. Smallish bill, though, and kind of a dark spot behind the eye. I paged through Peterson's. Hmm, maybe a winter-plumaged Bonaparte's? That would be a good bird--a lifer for me, in fact, though not a screaming rarity. Maybe a Laughing Gull, but it seemed much too small--Laughing Gulls are only a little smaller then Ring-Billeds.

The gull moved several times--it didn't care to stay around the bigger gulls. I don't blame it--gulls in general are assholes, though they weren't really bothering the smaller bird.

Eventually, it flew north out of sight around the eastern Bronx shore.

Time to go home. A Kingfisher came out and hunted along the Bronx Kill, and perched near the New York Post plant.

Kingfisher, posted

when I got home, I looked over my many photos of the gull to try to definitely ID it. I had a few of the bird in flight.

...nope.

Drat. Those aren't the wings of a Bonaparte's--they have kind of a white triangle thing going on on the top of the wing, and usually some black on the trailing edge. Laughing Gull. Oh well. A fine afternoon out, anyway.