Thanksgiving Birding–Live Updates from the Field!

Snow Bunting – Photo by Alex Lamoreaux

For Thanksgiving break, my friends and I always like to take a few days and go on a birding trip out of state. We always end up going to Cape May, since it is fairly close and we can always count on there being some great birds. However, this year we decided to mix things up a bit. First we thought, we would just stick in PA and maybe spend a few days up at Presque Isle SP….but then the Northern Lapwing invasion started.

So we quickly began making new plans – we would head east to New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts in search of the various Northern Lapwings and other great rarities and winter specialties being seen along the southern New England coast.This year, the Thanksgiving birding team consists of me and my two friends (and honorary Nemesis Birders) Ian Gardner and Josh Lefever. We are leaving State College on Friday morning, November 16th and planning on getting to Long Island by Friday night, prepared to get up early and bird hard all day on the island Saturday. There are quite a few target birds there (see the Google Map below). From there, we are going to take a ferry over to Connecticut and move east along the coast towards Cape Cod, stopping to see rare birds and find some cool state birds. We have to be back in central PA by Tuesday night.

I will be attempting to do live updates from the field concerning our successes, failures, and interesting sightings on this blog post, so be sure to check back often to see how we are doing. As you can see from the Google Map, we have quite a few target species and locations lined up – hopefully the birds cooperate and we have a little luck on our side! Feel free to explore our target map and check out the birds we hope to see! The map on the bottom shows our current location so you can really follow along with us!


Trip Map


Current location
No longer publishing Alex’s locations since the trip is over.