Migration Time: Jackson Childs' Gulf Crossing

As we gear up for the peak of migration, Jackson Childs, a birder from Tallahassee now living in Cambridge, has made freely available a re-edited version of Gulf Crossing: Story of Spring, a terrific documentary on neotropical migration he produced in 2012.  It is aimed at more general audiences and is suited particularly for use in schools.  It is a really nice overview for anyone on how weather patterns and the photoperiod govern migration timing and flight patterns.  It features some really lovely photography (especially of warblers) from Texas, Florida, and Mt. Auburn Cemetery!  You can stream it on Vimeo from Childs' site, or view it through YouTube here. Enjoy.

Purple Martin, Great Meadows, April 3, 2013

I was able to get off work a bit early today, so I went to Great Meadows in Concord to look for a Barn Swallow.  It was sunny, very gusty, and I spotted a large, swirling mass of swallows over the lower impoundment.  By the time I got to the boat ramp area, the cloud of swallows had moved over the upper impoundment.  Between 4pm and 5:15 I looked at swallows.  Around 4:15 I spotted a rather large, dark swallow and thinking it might be a Rough-Winged, I started following it.  Oddly, though, it was uniformly dark underneath.  Then it disappeared.  Around 4:45, after finally spotting a Barn Swallow (FOY), the big, dark swallow turned up again, flying near the tree line over the upper impoundment trail and within 40 feet, allowing really close views over a five minute period:  indigo body, light brown wings, blocky head, wide, fanned, notched tail, and several inches longer than the many nearby Tree Swallows. Quite different flight style. I managed a short video on my iPhone which at least shows its relative size and profile.

Purple Martins are uncommon in Middlesex County, and last year the first bird reported on eBird was May 2; none were reported (as far as I can tell) on eBird in 2011.

While looking at swallows a Wilson's Snipe flew in to the boat ramp area.  Nice afternoon.

Fieldfare in Carlisle, Massachusetts

With the memory of the Le Conte's Sparrow in Concord still fresh, Massachusetts birders were stunned on St. Patrick's Day by the news that Alan Ankers had discovered a Fieldfare among a large flock of Robins in Carlisle, Mass., located on Greenough Land off Maple St.  (Carlisle Mosquito article on Alan's sighting.)  Here are some admittedly grim record shots (hand-held phone, scope at 42x, bird at 150yds.)  Some good photography can be found in the eBird Rarities Photo Pool.

Fieldfare, Greenough Land, Carlisle, MA.  Heavy crop of iPhone shot at 42x, but enough to be diagnostic

Fieldfare.  Gray head and heavy eye-line, gray rump just visible, and white leading wing edge.

Fieldfare (on right) with Robin:  lankier build, generally more upright posture

Fieldfare is an ABA Code 4, although many of us were mystified why it was a 4 when an annual bird like Barnacle Goose is a Code 5.   I met five birders today who had seen the Fieldfare in 1986 at Nine Acre Corner; one wag commented, "I don't even get a new county bird!" The mood was celebratory, with numerous grizzled veterans of stake-outs past catching up (I heard chatter about the Ivory Gull of 75-76), young birders enjoying the scene, and one birder celebrating her 700th ABA bird.

Update:  the Fieldfare was relocated on March 19 after heavy snow by several parties, but appeared to be moving around quite a lot, with one sighting in adjoining Great Meadows NWR land.

March 21 update:  Fieldfare is now being seen down Maple St., south of the original location in the vicinity of Piggery Rd., which is the access road to the Great Meadows NWR--Carlisle Unit.  It has been seen much of the day behind the house next to Piggery Rd.  For updates, read MassBirds.

Spring Harbingers

Spring, and all those colorful, tiny migrants, seems far away, but to remind us that migration is much more than Mt. Auburn in May, this week marked the arrival of three reliable harbingers of spring.  Ludlow heard Red Winged Blackbirds at Great Meadows, at the White Pond Reservation rookery, and in West Concord.  Today, saw our first Killdeer and this evening, from across the Assabett River here at Concord Birds 2013 HQ we heard our first American Woodcock peenting.  Welcome back, spring.

Le Conte's Sparrow in Concord

Ludlow Griscom never saw a Le Conte's Sparrow in Concord, but his avatar has.  On February 11th Pete Gilmore and Paul Sullivan were walking Shadyside Avenue in the northeast corner of Concord, near the Lincoln line, when they spotted an unusual sparrow feeding in roadside grass.  They first reported it as a more-probable Grasshopper, then confirmed it as a Le Conte's.  By the end of the week hundreds of birders, photographers, birder photographers, passersby, and a van load of touring birders from New Jersey had seen this marvelous, mousy little bird.  Unlike other sparrows (except its fellow ammodramus sparrows), it would not flush when spooked; instead, it simply hunkered down or tunneled deeper into the grass.  From a distance of fifteen or even ten feet it was virtually invisible, its cryptic back pattern and buffy yellow face blending in perfectly with the grass and weeds.  There is an abundance of jaw-dropping pictures of this bird here, here, and here.  David Sibley posted an amusing video of its mouselike behavior.  Here are a couple of my more modest (cropped and somewhat sharpened) shots.

To my knowledge, the bird was not seen after February 15th.

My Town Patch

When is a local patch more than a patch?  I got thinking about this somewhat academic question last fall  as I found myself in a good-natured eBird competition with a very sharp teen birder who also had a Concord patch on eBird.  I finished the year with 161 birds, but he found over 170.  Both of us were intensively birding some reliable patches, and then assembling them into a larger town "patch."  It begs the question of what a patch really is, but the aggregate patch concept intrigued me as a potential tool for pulling in disparate sightings for a relatively small geographic area.  After all, what if my list were combined with his list—what would we have seen "together?"

Many aspects of the eBird database are virtual, not least of which are top-100 lists, recent sightings apps like BirdTrax, the species mapping tool, and so forth.  So the question eventually presented itself:  what might Ludlow Griscom have made of eBird if he were doing his famous study, Concord Birds, now?  One of the amazing things to me about his book was how he gathered sightings of his own and other birders into an aggregate representation of status and distribution of birds in the Concord area since the turn of the 20th century.  Is it always accurate?  Certainly not, but it is always suggestive, and Griscom preserves many amazing sightings from otherwise lost field lists of long-dead birders.

How would Griscom have assembled his data today?  eBird suggests itself as the logical tool for a relentless, competitive, highly-networked birder like Griscom.  At the heart of the eBird concept is, essentially, patch-listing, and I think this concept eludes many birders using it.  At Plum Island, a current and somewhat notorious example, eBirders have placed hundreds of personal location markers for their sightings, some on top of established hot spots, some at nearly random locations along the island, many representing single sightings.  If you run a recent sightings report from Plum Island, a Western Grebe might appear anywhere on the island, or only at Lot 1 ocean.  Compare the often chaotic eBird reporting with Tom Wetmore's meticulous Plum Island Sightings page and you see how dividing Plum Island into useful patches can really work.  Similarly, Griscom talked about the birds of Concord with real specificity, citing sightings by patch locations:  Nine Acre Corner, Great Meadows, Fairy Land, Fairhaven Bay, Merriam's Corner, and so forth.

Since my Concord patch list is assembled from many of the same locations that Griscom used, why not see what Griscom could have gathered by aggregating field lists from local patch birders?  And why not have some fun, too?  Enter Ludlow G. and his crowd-sourced Concord Big Year, 2013.

I hope you will join in the fun by keeping up with Ludlow and allowing him to shadow you in the field this year.  The challenge is 200 species, but also exploring potential patches which we tend to avoid, well, because tradition says they don't have birds.  Yes they do!

He's Everywhere!

Our man Ludlow G. has had a busy first week in his virtual 2013 Concord Big Year, and has birded with some good company, including Cole Winstanley, David Sibley, Lucas Hale, Chuck Johnson, Willy Hutcheson, Connie Schlotterbeck, Gian Fabbri, and Will Martens, Kathy Dia, and the rest of the Great Meadows weekly survey crew.  

If we had any doubts about what the great man might be like in his Web 2.0 incarnation, he's an inveterate lister, twitcher, and die-hard eBirder.  You see it, and he's there.  He has had a hankering to see the Gyrfalcon, but he's sticking to the rules (although he cheated and went for Canvasbacks at Fresh Pond).

This week he spent a lot of time at Kaveski Farm looking at sparrows, redpolls, and looking for shrikes with several parties.  He saw a Wood Duck on Jan. 1 and a continuing Rufous Hummingbird at a private residence (he knows people who know people); he's also seen Pine Grosbeaks and Common Ravens at Middlesex School.

As of this morning, Ludlow is at 55 species in Concord, not bad for a newly-plugged-in old timer!

Thanks to all who have contributed to the project.  The hope is to explore all the nooks and crannies of Concord through many eyes and reach 200 species.