In order to boost the quality of writing on the Nemesis Bird, and to further increase the number of posts and the awesome pictures that come with it, I have asked Alex Lamoreaux to join the writing staff. So now there are two of us. I will let him more fully introduce himself, but I think his passion for birding, hawkwatching, bird identification and field ornithology will add a lot to this blog. Hello! I am very honored to have been asked to contibute to Nemesis Bird and I hope my posts and photographs will help you enjoy this site even more. I have been deeply interested in wildlife since I was a little kid, and my love (or obsession)Â for birds began when my family moved to the Hershey, Pennsylvania area and I saw and identified my first Red-tailed Hawk.
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Here is one of my favorite digiscope shots of a yellow-rumped warbler. I took this at John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge (Tinicum) near Philadelphia when I was searching for a Western Tanager that had been reported there several years ago.
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Since moving to State College in June, I have been birding a lot, getting to know the area and its different hotspots. I was also able to do some productive birding during spring migration, picking up harder to find birds like Red-necked Phalarope and Mourning Warbler. Fall migration was excellent and I was able to find most of the expected passerines except for Black-billed Cuckoo, Connecticut Warbler and Cerulean Warbler. Birds I missed in the spring that others reported include Wilson’s Phalarope, Laughing Gull, Common Moorhen and both bitterns. Despite some of these misses from the days when I was just commuting to Centre from Lancaster, my year list currently stands at 188 species in Centre County.
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I just ran across a neat article on pine siskin migration from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Project FeederWatch. During the winter of 2008-09, there was a large irruption of pine siskins into the northeastern and southern states. Banders managed to catch and band a total of 31,004 siskins between September 2008 and July 2010. Of these banded siskins, 46 were recaptured again or their bands were recovered. When the siskins were banding location and recapture/recovery location were mapped (see below), two interesting trends stood out. Birds banded in the south during the irruption were later encountered almost due north. Birds banded in the northeast, on the other hand, were later encountered almost due west in Washington, Oregon and western Canada. As more siskins are recaptured, it will be interesting if this pattern holds of if other patterns emerge with additional data. For the full article, follow this link.
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The current weather pattern is looking very interesting for bringing some good birds our way. I’m no expert on weather, but if you look below at the current surface map below, (6:09pm October 26, 2010) it looks very similar to the diagram on the right from an article on weather for birders. The southwest winds associated with systems like these are implicated in bringing vagrants as well as reverse migrants. Commonly found southwestern vagrants include Ash-throated Flycatcher, Western Kingbird and Cave Swallow. These SW winds also can result in species such as Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Yellow-breasted Chat and Chimney Swift to reappear in the northeast weeks and months after the last previous sightings. This particular storm has set low pressure records in the midwest and was basically a huge non-tropical cyclone and has high winds associated with it. Hopefully the flow from the southwest will bring some interesting birds.
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Ducks, geese, grebes and loons are coming back which is exciting as it is one of the groups of birds that I am largely missing from my Centre County bird list, having moved to the area too late to catch them on their northbound migration in the spring. I just added both Red-necked Grebe and Black Scoter to my county lists this morning, two species I thought I might have difficulty actually finding. I thought I would show off some of my digiscope shots of waterfowl that I have taken over the years. They are of varying quality and it is mostly dependent on how close I was able to get to the birds.
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NWS Radar- 9/29/10 at 9:01 PM Just a few pre-storm musings: The radar is lighting up with migrating birds currently. With the rain hitting during the night, there is the possibility of a good fallout in the morning for anyone brave enough to be out and about. There are still a lot of warblers in the system and sparrows are just starting so there could be a nice variety of birds. More importantly, even though this storm is weak in terms of tropical storm activity, we may end up being on the eastern side of the storm which, I am told, is more likely to bring the interesting storm birds. Being so weak, maybe we can hope for some terns (Caspian, Forster’s, Common and Black) on Colyer Lake or Bald Eagle SP, or shorebirds at these locations or Julian Wetland.
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I recently received a review copy of Parrots of the World (Princeton Field Guides) by Joseph M. Forshaw and illustrated by Frank Knight from the Princeton University Press. The first thing that jumped out at me was the fantastic cover, showing some of the wide variation in plumage and color that this group exhibits. In the preface, Forshaw notes that parrots have always been popular, with a recent surge in parrot watching tours around the world. This book is intended as a field guide to fulfill that interest, and is based on the much larger handbook Parrots of the World: An Identification Guide published by the same duo in 2006. The book starts off with the standard introduction- parrot morphology, behavior and their status and conservation. Ranking among the most threatened bird groups, Birdlife International lists 123 species out of 356 species (34.6%) as being near threatened to endangered.
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Ron Pittaway just released his latest winter finch forecast. The full text of his forecast is below. For PA, it looks like Purple Finches and Common Redpolls will be moving south and we will hoepfully find good numbers of both. Red-breasted Nuthatches are also moving south this year. Finches such as the crossbills, Pine Grosbeak and Evening Grosbeak are forecast to stay north where seed crops were good this year. Ron Pittaway’s Winter Finch Forecast 2010-2011 This winter’s theme is that some finch species will irrupt into southern Canada and the northern United States, while other species will remain in the north. As an example, Common and Hoary Redpolls will move south whereas Pine Grosbeaks will stay in the north. See individual finch forecasts below for details. Three irruptive non-finch passerines are also discussed.
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