Road trip back to Pennsylvania….
written by Alex Lamoreaux
Anna and I just got back from a three day road trip from Blythe, California. Our trip was long and boring so I am pretty happy it is over and I am glad to be home! Both of us will be spending the rest of the fall and winter here in Pennsylvania. We are both extremely excited for fall migration, especially hawk watching!
Good thing during this time of the year Oklahoma is loaded with migrant Mississippi Kites, otherwise it would be an extremely boring state to drive through......
Jo Hayes Hawk Watch- Day 2
written by Drew Weber
Yesterday was the second day that I spent some time hawk watching at Jo Hayes Vista for the fall season. It was a relatively slow day with only 10 birds counted but that is pretty much expected in early August.
The first Broad-winged Hawk kettle passed by, only 4 birds though. Hopefully this year we will see good numbers of Broad-winged Hawks at Jo Hayes. Broadwings are really hit or miss in central PA since the kettles are using thermals rather than wind along ridges to migrate.
The highlight of the day for me was watching 3 Turkey Vultures lazily circling upridge, and then suddenly scattering, flying frantically away from the ridge. This piqued my interest and was quickly explained when a juvenile Bald Eagle popped up over the trees.
Juvenile Bald Eagle- photo by Alex Lamoreaux
White-eyed Vireo along the Lower Colorado River!
written by Alex Lamoreaux
This morning, some of the other cuckoo researchers that I work with were attempting to capture one of our nesting cuckoos at our best cuckoo breeding site along the Lower Colorado River and accidentally captured a fantastic find for this area of the US; a White-eyed Vireo! The site they were at was on the Arizona side of the river in a recently installed riparian ecological restoration. These sites were built in agricultural fields along the river for the benefit of threatened species like the 'Southwestern' Willow Flycatcher and the 'Western' Yellow-billed Cuckoo.
As the crew approached the net this morning, which was intended to capture one of our nesting cuckoos, they immediately noticed the odd bird in the mist net. Ben Zyla, who had just worked in Fort Hood and had captured and banded loads of White-eyed Vireo was the first to ID the bird. The bird appears to be undergoing a complete body molt, which likely means that it had over-summered in this area, and since this particular restoration site is the only one along this stretch of the river, I would guess it was there the whole time!
According to eBird records, it looks like this is the first sighting for the western half of the state. For California, there has been one other record along the Lower Colorado River, about 30 miles south of where this bird was found today. Below are some photos taken by Ben Zyla of the vireo. Unfortunately, I was at another site and so I didn't hear about this great find until I got back to the crew house and everyone told me.....
White-eyed Vireo - Photo by Ben Zyla
White-eyed Vireo - Photo by Ben Zyla
White-eyed Vireo - Photo by Ben Zyla
New eBird feature threatens to clog inboxes
written by Drew Weber
Just today as far as I can tell, eBird launched a new feature that threatens to clog my inbox. It's not enough that they already send out emails of recently reported ABA rarities and birds reported in Pennsylvania that I still don't have on my life list. Now, you can also subscribe to these alerts on the county level. This is huge for me as I enjoy county listing even more than I enjoy boosting my state list. With 67 counties in Pennsylvania I could really reach email overload in no time, especially since there are about 15 counties I have yet to bird in.
Western Tanager - one of the species I'd like to see in my Needs Alert for Centre County this year. I'll be waiting...
Subscribing to the Needs Alerts to new areas is very simple. Simply start typing your state or county into the text box and your desired area should pop up. You can subscribe to as many areas as you would like, but I would highly recommend getting a Gmail account (what, you don't have one?!) and filtering all the eBird alerts into a special label so that your productivity doesn't grind to a halt.
Selecting a county for alerts
Once you have your areas of interest selected, you can set how frequently you want updates. The default setting is to send out an email each day, but for areas of special interest to you, you can subscribe to the hourly updates. As soon as someone reports a species that you have not yet logged, an email should be set out and bam, the chase is on.
Managing Needs Alerts
It will be interesting to see how people end up using this information. It definitely makes information available from the eBird database in a much quicker and more focussed format. It allows people to passively receive information rather than having to keep a close eye on the bar charts to find the new birds themselves. It will also be helpful to get reminders on which species you still need to find in a certain region, it's sometimes easy to gloss over a common species that you are missing.
One addition I hope to see in the future is Needs Alerts for year lists. This would assist in boosting year lists, especially for those of use who have already built a reasonably large life list in our state or counties.
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