Bird Sightings

There's a nice thread called List Five Yard Birds That You Saw Today, but some of us have also been using it to post random bird sightings, not necessarily in our yard, so I thought I'd start a parallel thread to report any bird sightings anywhere. Ironically this one actually was in my yard!

I'll begin. This morning my wife and I were taking a walk around our fence when we found a Spotted eagle owl trapped in the barbed wire. We thought it was dead at first as it was so still, probably exhausted, but on closer inspection it turned out that it was alive, but one wing was badly damaged. I cut the wire to free the bird, but the barbs were deeply embedded in the wing, and the bone was visible. There wasn't much we could do except take the injured bird to the Raptor Rehabilitation Trust, a couple of hours drive from us. We handed it over and they decided to let it settle for a little before the vet came to look at it. We should hear some news of its prognosis in the coming days. They told me it was a juvenile. Magnificent birds.

Sad news. After the vet had examined it they discovered that the damage was too great and they had to put the bird down.

Heartbreaking, but I suspect not uncommon.

Imagine this would take Herculean efforts, but is there anything for barbedwire as there is for marking large plate glass windows, to warn birds away so they don't injure or kill themselves? Of course, most buildings in the US that could use such efforts (lights on, cutouts of birds of prey, etc) don't actually do so: the fact that something could be done, doesn't mean they are done.

We were wondering whether the fact that it was a juvenile meant it hadn't yet learned to recognise dangerous fences?

This morning: Ring-necked dove; Mosque swallow, Hamerkop, Variable sunbird, Hadada ibis.

I'm sooo happy! I finally identified a bird call I've heard for all my life but didn't know the bird that made it. I even learned to mimic it pretty well, close enough to get the bird to respond, but I never actually saw the bird that was singing.

Well, I just got a new telephoto lens for my camera, a Sigma 150-600 mm whopper, so I took it out to a local wildlife refuge and shot about 100 pictures, including a few of a bird I'd seen a million times but never knew the name of. When I looked it up online (Cornell Lab's bird guide) it turned out to be a mourning dove. And its call turns out to be the one I had been wondering about all my life! So happy!

Great story! And I like too that the bird is not one that makes headlines for being rare, it was significant and unknown to you, and when you discovered this bird you'd seen but only now identified was also the bird making that call, it's so much more satisfying than chasing something that others find meaningful. At least, that's how it is for me, and I recognise my own experiences in this story. The closest experience of mine to fit this was during COVID lockdown, when I identified the red-winged blackbird on the nearby riverbank, and connected its distinctive call to the bird itself.

>6 TempleCat: Good job! We have quite a few mourning doves (first cousin of the pigeon) in our area and I usually find them under bushes early in the morning. Love their sound!

>7 elenchus: I see a lot of red-winged blackbirds! Now you've made me go listen to their sound(s)!

>7 elenchus: >8 Tess_W: That moment of discovery made me feel like a kid again for a brief time - one of the mysteries of the world (at least to me) was explained. Satisfaction and happiness and wanting to tell someone 'Look, look at what I found!' ;-D

>6 TempleCat: wonderful!

oops - wrong thread

My latest sighting was, actually, in dream: a lot was going on, including a large spider spinning her web, but inexplicably a saw-whet owl or barred owl very clearly perched on the turnstile to the transit station I walked through. I don't commonly dream of wildlife, and I haven't recently read about, discussed, or encountered any owls, so this was striking enough I felt compelled to note it here.

There's a pair of Hildebrandt's Francolin that nest around our land, and I was really chuffed to see that they have chicks, at least two that I saw just now.

I had to look up the francolin, not familiar with the bird. What struck me first when reading your entry was the name's jarring similarity to that of the mammal pangolin.

Seemingly nothing more than coincidence, though evidently they are both small animals and both the targets of poachers.

Francolin is another of those bird names which seems to have changed in recent years. There's a related bird which we see from time to time which used to be called Yellow-necked Spurfowl but is now usually called Yellow-necked Francolin. A quick glance at google suggests "a francolin is smaller and has yellow legs. It flushes when disturbed from the open areas where it lives and has a musical call. A spurfowl is larger and has orange, red or black legs. It sits tight or runs when disturbed (rather than flushing) and roosts in trees at night", but it seems they are pretty much the same bird and the names are used a bit interchangeably, much like the plover and lapwing in my recent Bird of the Week.

Arrived at a church guest house in northern Uganda yesterday and the first bird I saw when I strolled out with my binoculars was a woodland kingfisher. Not rare, as their habitat extends all over East Africa, but not a bird I see very often, and I'm always excited to see any kingfisher. This morning I saw two of them, a male and a female.

I'm really chuffed that today I saw an African shoebill in Pakwach, northern Uganda, my first one for fifteen years. There are very few places in the world where they can be found, and I've seen them in both South Sudan and here. I spent the morning driving around the Murchison Falls national park. The falls themselves are awe-inspiring; the mighty Nile thunders through a gap just seven metres wide, and drops 45 metres into a gorge at a rate of 3,000 cubic metres per second. I saw a couple of dozen species of birds (would have been more but my driver wasn't very bird aware so we missed a lot of the smaller and faster ones) and loads of animals.

>17 John5918: I always like to see kingfishers.
>18 John5918: Sounds like a great trip! I remember your post on shoebills - very weird looking birds!

Just spent a superb weekend at Phophonyane Falls in Eswatini. It's a forest reserve, with over 300 species of birds, but as is usually the case in forests, I saw relatively few. However I was really excited to see a Narina trogon on my last morning. I was sitting having breakfast with the owner, a bird expert, feeling jealous as he had just seen one outside his bedroom window. As we finished breakfast he wandered out onto the veranda and suddenly called me out and pointed to one sitting on a branch only a few metres away! It stayed there for quite a while and we were able to study it. A beautiful bird, not incredibly rare but not something you see every day either, so I was really chuffed to have seen it. Incidentally it's bloody cold in both South Africa and Eswatini at the moment, mid-winter.

>20 John5918: eBird has it right - that's a spectacular bird!

A couple of days ago I spent four hours walking through a place called Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge along the Concord River in Concord, Massachusetts. The place is known among birders as a prolific site. I saw two birds the entire time! Two! A Great Blue Heron and an American Goldfinch. I mentioned it to two others and they both agreed - the sightings grow very sparse this time of year.

Where do the birds go? Are they resting up for migration in their nests or have they just decided that it's too hot and have headed for the beach? (I can picture them sitting under beach umbrellas, sipping on worm smoothies and catching a quick snooze.)

>22 TempleCat:

I also had a sparse birding experience the other day when I visited a friend who lives on a nature conservancy. Driving around the twenty thousand acre conservancy we saw very few birds or animals. There are normally between three and four thousand large animals there, but the wildebeest have disappeared completely and we saw few gazelle, zebra, giraffe and warthogs. Apart from a few ostrich, we only saw a handful of birds, including white-backed vulture, lapwing, egrets, Egyptian geese and a roller, but we were chuffed to see a crowned eagle, and as I was driving out in the afternoon a pair of African fish eagles flew in and settled on the much depleted dam. We think it is the multi-year drought which is depleting the wildlife. Not far from where I live, elephants have again raided a farm, which is unusual in our area, and is again probably due to the drought which has disrupted their normal feeding habits.

On the plus side (and not bird-related, although they have also seen the rare African shoebill in an area where I didn't know it could be found, and he showed me a recent photo of it in flight, which is even rarer), the same friend is also involved in wildlife conservation in South Sudan, and after intensive animal counts using aircraft as well as collaring animals on the ground they now estimate that there could be as many as five million tiang (related to hartebeest and topi) and white-eared kob (a gazelle), as well as smaller numbers of Nile lechwe, giraffe, elephant and lions, moving around in parts of the country which were previously inaccessible to conservationists due to insecurity and armed conflict. This is three times the number of animals in the more famous Serengeti migration of wildebeest in Kenya and Tanzania, and if confirmed would be the largest land animal migration in the world.

As for posting photos, I have always used the instructions in the first post in the The New How To Do Fancy Things In Your Posts Thread thread. I don't know whether they are still working or not.

>22 TempleCat: I'm *really* glad to hear some good news about your animal populations! I lived in Africa for several years and once went on a three week long safari in Kenya, visiting several of your national parks. I was bowled over by the magnificence!

As for displaying images, thank you for your advice. As it happens, that's exactly what I was following, myself. The problem was in getting the url of the image itself, not the page it sat on. I finally figured out how to get it on my iPad. I've achieved display! I've edited my earlier posting to include the pics.

>24 TempleCat:

Thanks for those beautiful pictures. I think I know the problem that you faced - that method only seems to work for photos with an image file such as .jpg or similar, but some online pictures don't seem to have that type of file. It's happened to me from time to time.

I'm glad you had the chance to experience Kenya's national parks, which really are superb. We can thank the Maasai people, who traditionally did not hunt and eat wildlife, unless it was to defend their cattle from predators. Whereas wildlife was hunted to extinction in many parts of the country (and the continent), on traditional Maasai land the wildlife lived in relative harmony with the people and their cattle, and many of the best national parks are in these areas. I vivildy recall visiting one Maasai friend, who of course wanted to take me to see his cows as the first priority, and as we walked into the bush we found gazelle grazing contentedly in amongst the herd of cows and goats, oblivious to both the domestic livestock and the human herders.

Apart from periodic drought, which generally the wildlife somehow survives and springs back again, one of the biggest conservation threats at the moment is the closing off of migration routes due to human habitation, including fences and roads. We live on a migration corridor between the Mara national park to our west and the Nairobi national park as well as the Athi and Konza plains to the east, but we see fewer and fewer wildlife. A few months ago eland were eating our young trees, but we didn't complain. One of our neighbours, a farmer, complained to the Kenya Wildlife Service that the eland were eating her crops, and their response was basically, "They're not trespassing on your land; you're trespassing on theirs!", and they gave a similar response to the farmer whose land was invaded by elephants, "If you want to farm on an elephant migration route, invest in a big electric fence!" The Governor of our county appears to be including wildlife corridors amongst his priority land policies.

>25 John5918: The photos are jpg, mine, taken on that visit to Great Meadows. My problem wasn't the file type, it was that I was using the url I got from the postage stamp image in my junk drawer, rather than the url from the full sized image that appears on the page displayed after clicking on that postage stamp image. User error, user error, abandon ship! 😋

Kudos to your Governor and the Kenya Wildlife Service! It's the same conflict the world over - livestock farmers versus wolves (substitute your favorite apex predator), crop farmers versus most animals, it seems.

That safari was the experience of a lifetime! Of course, I took a thousand pictures (on film, so I had to be conservative!), but my favorite souvenir is a "rungu" - the stick with a large knob at the end that many of the men carry when out in the wild. They are quite effective at throwing it at lions or other predators of their cattle, they explained to me when I asked. I then bargained for one with a definitely surprised Maasai tribesman, using my extremely limited Swahili, so I was over the moon happy! Our safari guide was highly amused that I came all the way to Kenya and bought a stick.

Solitary Sandpiper, Ring-Billed Gull, Mute Swan - not much for a hot, sticky, exhausting afternoon (too many hills and mosquitoes!)

(Just as an aside, I always take pictures of the birds I mention here. I then run home and find the birds in the books I have. It's the only way I can ID most of them! If anybody would like to see a picture of any bird, just ask and I'll post it. Or, I could just automatically post the pics. Which would y'all prefer?)

>28 TempleCat:

My brother-in-law and my god daughter are both keen birders and photographers, with expensive cameras, and both of them tend to shoot off dozens of pictures of the same bird. Many of those pictures turn out to be rubbish, with the bird blurred or just presenting its arse to the camera, and eventually get deleted, but they are invaluable when identifying it, as one of those blurred pictures might just include a glimpse of the small identifying feature which distinguishes this species from a close relative. Keep on taking those photos!

>29 John5918: Oh, your description is absolutely right on the money! My camera takes 30 pictures in one second - easy peasy - but sorting through the many hundreds from a single photo shoot afterwards makes me want to slow down my camera to something more manageable. And all animals seem to think their tail is their best side!

>28 TempleCat: Always up for some pics! Just let us know WHERE (approximate) the bird is from!

A good day at the Arlington (Massachusetts) Reservoir!

Stilt Sandpiper
Kildeer
Pectoral Sandpiper
Purple Sandpiper
Lesser Yellowlegs
Double-Crested Cormorant
Great Egret (pictured)

That's a lovely shot of the egret with a fish!

>32 TempleCat: Great picture. The egret looks very dinosaurian!

>34 NorthernStar: Huh! You're right. I hadn't thought of the bird that way, but it does look dinosaurian. That acorn didn't fall far from the tree!

>35 TempleCat: I love it when birds show their ancestry.

(Edited to add Saturday's outing)

Friday - a nice day to be outside, enjoying the birds and turning leaves! At the Arlington (Massachusetts) Reservoir again - Eastern Phoebe, Great Blue Heron, numerous Mallards, a Green-Winged Teal family, and an American Robin (pictured).



And, this Saturday turned out nice, too, sunny and temps around 80° F, weird for the end of October in Massachusetts, but nobody's complaining! So, I was off to a hike around Woburn's Horn Pond (north of Boston). I saw Canadian Geese and plenty of Mallard ducks, of course, but the highlight was a flock of American Coots (pictured), a first for me!



I also got a shot of a Double-crested Cormorant



and an interesting picture of a Great Blue Heron standing by the waterfall over a dam wall!



A good couple of days, which I'm afraid are going to followed by cold and rain. (So I can sit home and process my pics!)

It's been a really nice couple of days here in Massachusetts, with the temps reaching 60°F in the final days of November! So, it was bird watching we go, tra la tra la 🎶. At the Mystic River State Reservation (a few miles north of Boston) I saw and photographed a couple of Hooded Mergansers, numerous Mallard ducks and Canadian Geese, three European Starlings, numerous American Robins and Northern Mockingbirds, a Herring Gull and a Song Sparrow. At the Mystic Lakes (which the Mystic River flows out of, going all the way to the ocean), I had three Common Ravens checking out the territory, a couple of Double-Crested Cormorants who spent the afternoon lounging on a pier, two Mallards winging their way north and a large Bald Eagle (pictured) who soared over both lakes, the long way!

I also learned from a man casting a worm in the upper lake that striped bass enter the river from the Atlantic and swim all the way to the lakes to spawn. Another man told me all about PFAS in artificial turf and how it contributes to bird deaths. Birding is an educational activity!

Another couple of days at the Mystic Lakes in Massachusetts:
- 5 Double-crested Cormorants
- 4 Ring-billed Gulls
- 1 Bald Eagle
- 7 Canadian Geese
- 3 Mallards
- 3 Mute Swans

I went to the lakes to practice taking photos of birds in flight with my telescopic lens cranked all the way out. I think I might have worked out a technique for quickly latching onto the subject. Now, if I could just get it to fly in a straight line!

Finally, a day without chores and the weather was nice and sunny! I walked around the Arlington (Massachusetts) Reservoir and kept hearing this very loud raspy "kunk brrrrr" sound but had no idea what was making it - a bird or maybe even a frog or a bug! I spent three hours trying to find it. Finally, a bird flew onto a nicely visible branch on a nearby tree and proceeded to shout to the entire neighborhood "kunk brrrrrrrrrrrr"! It was a Red-Winged Blackbird - quite common around here, but I had never associated it with the sound it was making. I saw lots of other birds - Mallards, Buffleheads, Mute Swans, Canadian Geese, swallows that flew by so fast and so far away I couldn't identify them, but the Blackbird (pictured below) stood out because I now know what "song" it makes!

Love Red wings! Great shot!

TempleCat (#40):

Once you know the "konk-a-REEE" song of a RWBB you will hear them all. the. time. This early in the year it's probably going to be Tree Swallows, which are always the first to arrive.

>43 lorax: ... you will hear them .All.The.Time. I believe that! They are really loud. It's what got me hunting for the source of that noise in the first place.

Spring is springing in southern Germany! The short-distance migrants like Blackcap, Chiffchaff and Black Redstart are pouring in, and today I saw my first Black Kites of the year circling over the road as I drove home. North shore of Lake Constance. Nice when the sun shines!

The ospreys are back on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a good two weeks earlier than I've seen them before. We saw one on Saturday on one of the local nesting platforms, and today two more.

>42 An_avarage_person: Sorry to hear this.

Today was a good day. Saw my first swallows of the season, a small flock of garganey on the lake, two male marsh harriers migrating through, found a goldfinch nest and watched two grey-headed woodpeckers shouting at each other from just across the river. Now we have a strong föhn wind blowing, with Sahara dust making the air a bit dingy. Lake Constance, southern Germany

Yesterday was a red-letter day for me. Out walking yesterday morning, I saw my first ever Lesser Redpoll on my local patch. It may not sound like much, but seeing a new species on my local patch, even one comparatively common nationwide (the UK), is a bigger thrill than I could ever get from driving a tank of petrol's distance to stand alongside a crowd of twitchers to see some exhausted, mega-rare vagrant.

>49 alaudacorax:

And the day before I saw this year's first Blackcap ... this is exciting stuff, people!

>50 alaudacorax: it doesn't matter whether the new species is rare or common: if you haven't seen it before it's exciting, and if you find and identify it for yourself, doubly so.

I met a friend down on my local patch today and installed in another full morning of birding - we were treated today to no fewer than four separate lesser spotted woodpeckers (which really live up to their name with their secretive habits), one of which was a male perched up in a birch tree that allowed us to get the telescope on him. As my friend had only seen her first lesser spot yesterday, she was very, very pleased!

I went out today to a nearby state park along Massachusetts' Mystic River to see how the animals would behave through this afternoon's eclipse of the sun - 93% fully covered in my area. I arrived as it was just starting and saw a couple of robins, a couple of squirrels, a few mockingbirds, a half dozen or so Canadian Geese, another half dozen Mallards, a couple of grackles, three red-winged blackbirds, a mourning dove and about 40 or so people sitting around on the benches and having picnics on the hillsides.

As the sky darkened, the squirrels disappeared and the birds seemed to become discombobulated. Acres of birds seemed to all start chirping and calling and squawking and letting the world know that they were alarmed. They started flying from tree to grass to bush and back to tree over and over.

A grackle landed about two meters from me as I was standing there looking at the trees, and it started poking at the dirt like it expected there to be worms or bugs or something. A robin landed even closer. Two Mallards, a male and a female, nearly stepped on my feet as they walked by on the path! I've never seen birds so focussed on something else that they would come so close to a human.

The humans also acted strangely - most (but not all) looked up from their phones!!! Twice I saw a bat fly by, right over my head. The second one was attacked by a bird as it flew.

All settled back into normalcy as the sun returned to full brightness, only a few birds flew about or chattered. The humans packed up and left as well.

I heard a couple of Phoebes yesterday by the Ipswich river in Massachusetts. First of the year for me.