Category: birding

Saturday started with a walk through Lot 1 with hopes of White-winged Crossbills and other birds that would be new for Waltham (or at least my half-hearted bigby list). That didn’t work out, but I still got some CBC scouting in. Lots of sparrows along the edges and a few woodpeckers were the extent of things.

After an hour at Lot 1, I got in the car and headed over to Met State. Not that exciting either, but a few good pockets of birds. One started with a chickadee and Carolina Wren and then ended up containing 3 Brown Creepers, a Golden-crowned Kinglet, several nuthatches, woodpeckers, goldfinches, and titmice. Checking the pines, the Great Horned was in the usual spot, which is definitely good for the CBC:

I had approached from a slightly different angle and this time I noticed some sticks higher up in the tree. This was the tree that I was told was the nest tree and the pile of sticks looked a lot like this. Think I can mark that as confirmed (UN – used nest) but I’ll probably just check back in a couple months. The rest of the walk was pretty birdless, although a Golden-crowned Kinglet taunted me into attempting so photos that didn’t come out.

Even though the weather today was much worse, the birds were better. Steve Moore and Barbara Volkle reported a lingering Semipalmated Plover at the Arlington Res, so I headed there to sneak it onto my county year list. I got a quick view flying across the water and then was able to watch it running along the mud flats for quite a while. I’m not fully sure, but it’s among the latest inland records for Massachusetts if not the latest. Hopefully it will make it through the sleet and will be a December record.

Other birds around included 3 Killdeer, 4 Shovelers and many Gadwall and Wigeon. I took a few pictures of the ducks but since it was dark and they all happened to have their heads in the water, I’m not going to show any.

After leaving, I hopped on Rt. 2 and then 128 and made a quick circle around the Cambridge Res. Passing on 128, I noticed lots and lots of geese but couldn’t find them from the other side. I settled for about 60 Common Merganser and a few Hooded. A spin through the office parks didn’t have anything interesting, so I continued on to Flint’s Pond.

Driving up to Flint’s, I could see ducks in close. Walking down the road, I kept finding more and more at each different viewpoint. The majority were Hoodies, but there were plenty of Common Mergansers and a few Bufflehead, Ring-necks, Common Goldeneye, and Ruddies mixed in. Two Great Blue Herons were along the shore as well. Not too bad.

And in perfect timing, I headed home and was putting the lens cap on the camera in the driveway when I noticed the window was wet. Two minutes later and there was a nice sleet/rain mix coming down that I had missed entirely.

This interesting girl showed up at the feeders over the weekend:

White wings and a lot of white on the tail, not quite the usual.

(Un)fortunately, it is just a House Sparrow. It appears to be partially leucistic one though. It’s actually one of two that are in the flock that hangs out in the yard. The other’s a male that’s almost normal, except a couple of the tertials are white. He’s hung around for quite some time now (she just showed up) but hasn’t been back to the feeder when I finally got the camera out.

And here’s the closest to a flight shot I got. I hope to get a better one as it’s a very striking bird with the wings spread.

Update: got the male finally

And for pictures of more exotic birds:

Big fallout inland today. There was a very large flock on the Cambridge Reservoir and then a smaller flock on Flint’s Pond in Lincoln. How many can you count in each?

The Res flock:

View it full size to count better

Flint’s (this one was digiscoped, didn’t even realize it was possible with a 100-400 until I tried):

full size

I see about 130 on the Res and about 45 in the other. Both flocks were flying around for a minute or two and I got the same count on the Flint’s flock at that point. The Res flock was too big to count, especially on the water where they were constantly moving in front of each other and very tightly clumped.

These two immature White-crowned Sparrows were at Great Meadows on 10/13. Gambel’s, Eastern, or integrade? I’m not sure if I have both birds shown singly or if I ended up with 6 of the same one.

Thanks to Marj for Middlesex county #259.

Other highlights on the day included a White-eyed Vireo (unfortunately the only photo I snapped was of a blog going behind branches) and some great deals on books. And Pyle Pt. 2 came in the mail, more on that soon.

Hey, look at that. About time and about time I upgraded from 4.5. I may be able to hold off on writing my own stuff for awhile now.

My field trip to the Waltham St. Fields had a rather interesting experience today. We saw a large, immature Cooper’s Hawk sitting in the trees along the channel. Once we got up to the water, we were getting good looks at the Wood Ducks and Green-winged Teal that were mixed in with the Mallards when the hawk decided it wanted one for lunch. It dropped over the water and hovered above the ducks for several seconds. The ducks flapped but didn’t take off and the hawk had to return to the trees. This repeated several times and by the third or fourth time I remembered I had my camera. Pictures aren’t great, but they do show a bit of the action.

The hawk was clearly concentrating on the smaller ducks but the ducks were smart enough to stay on the water, so it remained empty-taloned.