Unless there was a Dovekie in our road, we weren’t going to get out to look for one…at least once we actually got home!

A thorough search of Scarborough Marsh on Sunday and the Southern York County CBC on Tuesday, plus a pair of birdwalks, accounted for the vast majority of my birding this week. After the count, I would have liked to do some post-storm birding, but we were preoccupied with: 1. getting past floodwaters to even get back to our house, 2. checking on the house (it was fine, the waters didn’t quite reach it), 3. Working at the store leading up to Christmas, and 4. Cleaning up the yard. In other words, there wasn’t much birding the rest of the week. Too bad – there were probably some more great birds (at least Dovekies) to be found! Alas.

• 1 Turkey Vulture, over downtown Freeport, 12/16 (with Saturday Morning Birdwalk group).

• 1 ROUGH-LEGGED HAWK (Pine Point), 5 total Great Blue Herons, 36 total Horned Larks, 19 Dunlin, 1 Northern Flicker, etc, Scarborough Marsh, 12/17.

• While everyone else was out finding wrecked Dovekies on (way) inland lakes on Tuesday, Jeannette and I were covering the “Moody Sector” of the Southern York County Christmas Count. We tallied 61 species (felt like we had everything except Dovekies!), with highlights including 1 Turkey Vulture (3^rd Count Record!), 1 Merlin (9^th Count Record), 1 female Red-winged Blackbird, 1 Chipping Sparrow, 1 Double-crested Cormorant, 2 Yellow-rumped Warblers, and 1 adult Iceland Gull. Some of our better tallies (for our section) included 103 Black Scoters, 26 Northern Gannets, 6 Red-tailed Hawks, 46 Great Black-backed Gulls, 28 Song Sparrows, 21 Northern Cardinals, and 94 House Finches.  American Goldfinches were also numerous – as they have been in most places, but we didn’t have any other irruptives. Black-capped Chickadee numbers were very low, and only the well-vegetated neighborhoods with lots of oak, bird, and conifers held a lot of feeder birds – similar to my postulations on the recent blog about surrounding habitat quality. 

• 1-2 Red Crossbills continue in and around our property in Durham on a daily basis, hopefully a sign of upcoming or perhaps even current breeding.

UPCOMING TOURS.

• No Birdwalk, 12/30.
• Winter Waterbirds Workshop with Down East Adventures. Sunday, January 14^th.  Info here.
• Gull Identification Workshop. Saturday, February 3^rd and Sunday, February 4^th.  Info here.