USA day 7: Montezuma & Richmond

Left Cornell early in the morning and headed over to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. What a great place! Highlight included two of our target species there - 3-4 Cerulean Warblers, and three Sandhill Cranes. Lots of other good stuff including American Black and Caspian Terns, Eurasian Wigeon and Ring-billed Duck. Again few migrants around.

Pied-billed Grebe

Blue-winged Teals 

Loads of Great Blues around 

Common Gallinule

Purple Martins

Tree Swallow 

Plenty of Yellow Warblers

And American Redstarts as well:

We got directions to a pair of these beautiful Red-headed Woodpeckers:

Then we drove up towards Rochester where we're staying with our dear frined Laura Kemmermeier. After enjoying her great hospitality, we headed off for some birding at Great Bend Nature Trail. It was very hot and humid so not too many birds around, but a nice selection of residents showed - Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Scarlet Tanagers etc. 

Wood Thrush

Eastern Bluebird

In the evening Jonathan and me gave a talk at the Rochester Birding Association. I really enjoyed it - great people and good to meet in person some FB friends!

USA day 6: Warbler Bonanza & eBird

Today was spent with the company of our friends and partners at eBird / Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We met up early with Chris and Marshall and went off birding. First we checked a couple of migrant sites near Ithaca that were rather quiet. Then we moved on to Hammond Hill that was fantastic - at last I was able to get proper photos of warblers. Most species really behaved well today. Great place and lovely scenery.

Chestnut-sided Warbler - so pretty

Mourning Warbler - good bird!

Black-throated Blue Warbler - is he the prettiest of all?

Canada Warbler 

Blackburnian Warbler - female. Pity the male stayed high up in the canopy.

Magnolia Warbler

Myrtle Warbler

Hooded Warbler - slightly better views than last time

Lots of other good species around, including Northern Waterthrush, Purple Finch, Scarlet Tanager, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets, several Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, Veery and more. Boom!

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker - male

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker - female

Veery

Black-capped Chickadee 

Dark-eyed Junco

Habitat at Hammond Hill

After not enough birding we had to leave and go back to the lab for an intensive day of meetings. It was a very productive day that hopefully will lead to more cooperation with the Lab and with eBird. 

Difficult to stay focused during meetings with this view out of the window - Sapsucker Woods:

At lunchtime Jonathan and me gave a presentation to Lab staff - I think it was very good, and I was glad to meet John Fitzpatrick at last. 

Many thanks to Chris, Jessie and Marshall for organizing this visit and coordinating it, and to all eBird team for the great time we had together. 

USA day 5: We are the Champions!

Today was a big and very special day for myself. So it happened that our total of 178 species we saw in Cape May County yesterday gave us the World Series of Birding Cape May County Award! Truly awesome. Respect goes to Cornell Sapsuckers who won the State Award, and to The Monarchists for winning the Swarovski Optik Carbon Footprint Award - they all did very well. 

The closing event was great fun. So many children and youth were onboard - great to see and congrats to all those who train & teach young birders in the USA - you must be doing a great job.

Again, many thanks to Swarovski Optik for kindly providing our team with the best optics on this planet, and to New Jersey Audubon for organizing the World Series of Birding with great success. Special thanks to our friends Kevin Carlson, Michael O'Brien and Pete Dunne for all their help and ongoing support. Thumbs up to Zen Zunguruhe team (they did very well themselves, winning the Cape May Island Award) for their help during the scouting days.

So how did we do it? First of all , most credit goes to Tom Rreed. Tommy's not only such a great guy, he's an ultra-sharp birder, and knows Cape May and its birds like the back of his hand. With his knowledge and experience we came up with a very good strategy (Thanks again to Michael O'Brien for helping us in this), and make necessary adjustments during the day.

We worked very well as a team - in the field all of us found good birds, and in the car we all had our own roles. Jonathan did most of the driving. Well, we didn't die so his driving was probably OK...  But well done to Jonathan for his supernatural abilities of driving and birding for 24 hours straight. Tommy did the navigation, and I was in charge of the list, priorities and times. Dan was in charge of the finance (Wawa stops) and for the good spirits. We laughed so much that it made the whole race day very enjoyable.

So, until next year - thanks to the organizing team and to my team mates!

After the ceremony we went to the pee fields outside Cape May, where we did a not-too-shabby hawkwatch. Quite many hawks and flying turkeys in the sky, but highlight was exceptional numbers of Mississippi Kites. Hard to say exactly how many we had in total - first we had one, then three, then nine (!) and then another four. All headed in the same direction. Were they the same birds doing a circuit or different birds? Dunno. But even nine is crazy in Cape May standards.

Mississippi Kite

Three Mississippi Kites and an Osprey!

After saying goodbye to everyone we drove off all the way to Ithaca, NY. Tomorrow we're spending a day with Cornell / eBird guys - will be great.

USA day 4: World Series of Birding

Wow, what a day it was. So it started off at midnight, after I had slept for about an hour... Not enough... We headed out immediately and spent the first hours of the night listening to night stuff, that was highly successfull. We had Eastern Screech, Barred and Great Horned Owls, Chuck-will's-widows, Whip-poor-wills and Common Nighthawks, King, Virginia and Clapper Rails, and a good selection of shorebirds. At some points there were really nice conditions and Chuck wills were singing at full blast - I really enjoyed that:

During the first couple of hours there was nice passerine migration with some thrushes, sparrows and warblers going overhead but later on it went more quiet in the sky - either the migrants gained height or they stopped migrating because of some for that settled in. Tom was just awesome in picking up those thin calls and pointing them out. Anyway, before dawn we were already very satisfied and had a good selection of species. We hardly missed anything we had planned to connect with which was good. 

At dawn we headed out to check some beaches at the State Park. There was not too much passerine migration but the sea was very much alive - many hundreds of Red-throated and Common Loons, lots of Black Scoters with few Surf and White-winged mixed in, shorebirds going through etc. Not too many birds in the saltmarshes but we had the first of two Little Blue Herons of the day - not an easy bird to get.

Field Sparrow

Little Blue Heron

Surf and Black Scoters

Common Loon (AKA Great Northern Diver)

After we were done at the beach we drove around the island and checked several migrant sites. Generally it was a very slow day for migration, with sites like Higbee Beach being almost devoid of migrants, but with hard and effiecient work, and as a result of good scouting, we did score well at some purple patches and eventually had a very good selection of warblers and other migrants - a hopping total of 26 warbler species!!! It was really a matter of finding a single of this and a single of that, and it worked out very well. On such a day I had very limited photo opps, so I really didn't bother with those tiny warblers high up in the canopy and against the sky. But some highlights we had were Canada, Chestnut-sided, Palm, Pine, Prarie and lots of others. I did casually photograph some commoner local stuff:

Black Vulture

So pretty isn't it?

Downy Woody

Great Crested Flycatcher - he is great and he is crested

White-eyed Vireo

We worked the migrant sites on the island until about noon. Then we headed towards the north of the county to get some different habitats. Belleplain State Forest was tough with difficult weather (very hot and windy) but still we did manage to find almost everything we wanted there - Yellow-throated, Prothonotary and Worm-eating Warblers, Yellow-throated Vireo, Eastern Bluebird and a few other bits and pieces.

In the afternoon we returned to the island. We did some more seawatching that was actually very productive - we added some quality species including Royal Tern (bird of the day for me though views were rather distant). Cove Pool was very productive: 

Stilt Sandpiper

Green-winged and Blue-winged Teals

On Reed's Beach there were big numbers of shorebirds feeding on eggs of the first spawning Horseshoe Crabs - mainly Sanderlings:

In the afternoon the sun actually came out for a few minutes

Seaside Sparrows

Density of breeding Ospreys is phenomenal in Cape May County

Late in the afternoon we mopped a few species up around the harbour and Avalon - we were very focused and productive:

Long-tailed Duck - one of two we had during the day

We did very well with herons - in the afternoon added Great Blue, Tricolored and these stunning Yellow-crowned Night Herons: 

On Avalon in the evening we had a pair of Piping Plovers - mega birds:

American Herring Gull - this one's dedicated to Martin Garner

A few more mop-up species in the evening were this long-staying Red-necked Grebe: 

Last bird I photographed with almost no light at all was this Spotted Sandpiper:

In the evening we spent more time looking for American Woodcock and Sora but with no luck. There was very little in the way of active nocturnal migration calls so we called it a day and returned to Cape May at about 23:00. We got back totally knocked out but very very satisfied.
To conclude the day, it was a mind-blowing day. We saw so much, despite the fact that migration was on the low side. We had a very good time together as a team - that's the good thing about doing the county race rather than the state so there was even time for a couple of Wawa stops. We had many good laughs, and were espicially excited with one of the more difficult species that we connected with only at 18:30 - Feral Pigeon! I had never screamed so hard before for seeing a pigeon!
I don't know the final results yet but I think we had a very good day. More on this to come very soon!