If at first you don't succeed...

Well, last year's experiment turned out to be a total dud, but a new year means a new effort, so here we go again. Today's photos were taken while participating in the Cape May Bird Observatory's "Kick Off Your Year List" event -- a great day with good friends and more than 75 species of birds.

Do geese party on New Year's Eve? These guys looked decidedly hung over... Sleeping in, perhaps?

 

The first sunset of 2015

Snipe hunt

When I was just a little kid, the big kids in my neighborhood found my natural history knowledge very frustrating. They couldn't send me out with a sack to catch the "furry snipes that ran around in the woods at night" because as a keen little birdwatcher, I already knew that story was total rubbish.  Here's a real snipe in action -- a Wilson's Snipe foraging along the edge of a wet spot in the corner of a field near our house.

For Shell

My sister-in-law is a big fan of the color orange. Her house has some fabulous orange accents, and her wardrobe has some stunning pieces in the same color. Somehow, I think she'd approve of the spectacular male Orange-collared Manakin we spotted this morning. He was resting on a vine, waiting for a female to pass by his dance stage. Wow!

Electric blue

There's no denying it: feeder birds in Costa Rica are a lot more gaudy than anything we have in New Jersey. Yes, we have Northern Cardinals and Blue Jays and American Goldfinches, and they can be bright and colorful. But somehow, they don't have the neon intensity of tropical species. And when a feeder is swarming with dozens of species like this Red-legged Honeycreeper (here taking a break from nibbling a nearby banana), well, the eyeballs are very nearly overwhelmed!

A male Red-legged Honeycreeper

Red faced

I nearly forgot to take a picture today. As it was, I downloaded photos tonight and found I'd only snapped the shutter four times. Four. That's the second lowest total all year -- not good for someone who's on a self-imposed mission to post a picture a day. Sadly, though I tried four times to get "the" photo of this Red-headed Barbet, none of the four was a particularly good shot. The shadows in the verdant green forest were just a little too deep, the bird just a little too distant, the blue sky in the background just a little too bright. But take my word for it, in real life this wee beastie was spectacular!

Freedom

The skies over Costa Rica are full of raptors these days. In addition to the many locals, there are thousands of migrants headed north. The other day near La Selva, we hit the motherlode as the sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened over the marsh we were visiting. From horizon to horizon, hundreds and hundreds of Turkey Vultures and Swainson's Hawks circled in towering thermals, like bubbles in boiling pots. There were places in the sky where there were quite literally rivers of birds streaming over, so high they were just scraps of darkness against the high cirrus clouds. The sheer number of birds was goose bump inducing.

A hunting Swallow-tailed Kite, newly arrived from South America, surfs the airwaves.

Baying

A reported Little Gull along the beach in Del Haven brought a few of us scrambling to the bayshore this afternoon. The tide was out, and the flats stretched brown and soggy towards the receding water, littered with shorebirds and gulls. From the frenetic activity, it was obvious that there was plenty to eat out there. There were plenty of interesting patterns on those flats, as well.  And yes, we saw the gull.

Looking west from Miami Beach

A gang of Dunlins checks out the shrinking pools

Sandy ridges on the flats

A hardened ring of mollusks. Did someone plant them here?

Birthday presents

An early spring day in the field = the perfect birthday.

 The odd flowers of the Skunk Cabbage poke from the mud at the Beanery.

 A lone female Black Scoter (R) gets lots of attention from a group of males at Sunset Beach.

Glorious blue sky, here near the Nature Conservancy's Lizard Tail Swamp Preserve.

 A vernal pool along the power line, much fuller than it usually is at this time of year.

 Virginia Beardgrass, golden in the sun.

 An army of Dunlin on Avalon's beach.

 An American Bullfrog tadpole, thriving despite the chilly temperatures.

The end of a lovely day was spent watching Short-eared Owls hunting over Jake's Landing.

Timberdoodle

I still remember the first American Woodcock I ever saw. My dad and I were birding along a wooded path on Manitoulin Island in Canada. It was raining -- not hard, just a misty drizzle -- and condensing drops caught in the pine needles and pattered down onto the jewel-bright moss that carpeted the forest beside the trail. We were walking along, dripping in our olive-green ponchos, when suddenly a fat rock detached itself from the side of the path and wobbled its way into the forest ahead of us. What camouflage! We watched in delight as it prodded and probed the verdant forest floor, slurping earthworms out of the soft soil. A shared memory, still treasured some 40 years later.

A Timberdoodle (aka American Woodcock) pauses beside a busy Cape May road. It was feeding in one of the few places where the snow had melted enough that it could reach the ground.

Waxwings

En-route to a restaurant lunch, we came across a gang of Cedar Waxwings near where we parked; they were resting and digesting, having stuffed themselves on berries from the hedge around the parking lot. Actually, they're champions at digesting: studies have shown that a berry gets from one end to the other of a Cedar Waxwing in less than 20 minutes!

Merlins

We have a Merlin roost along Sunset Boulevard this year. Perhaps they're there every year, and I've just never noticed before. But this year, they're hard to miss. They gather on the wires and utility poles along the road edge each evening, watching for one last chance to grab a meal before dark. Sometimes there are as many as 5 or 6, a few sitting quietly with only their heads swiveling, others bursting off on flashing sorties through the nearby junipers. They're small and dark and fierce, winter visitors from the far north who spend a few brief months with us before returning to their wilder breeding grounds.

Harbinger

I was right. Spring is coming. A little bird told me so. He sat on a Phragmites stem and belted his song out into the golden late afternoon sunshine, challenging everything within hearing distance -- particularly the rival singing from a sumac bush across the road. A few days of warmth, a few extra minutes of daylight and suddenly the birds are stirring. We've begun to see the first few early migrants: a handful of Tree Swallows coursing over the dunes at The Meadows, two Northern Gannets gliding north over the sea, a growing number of Forster's Terns snoozing on the low-tide sandbars at Miami Beach. And the songsters are starting to tune up again. The grating "oralee" of the Red-winged Blackbirds is one of my first hints that the change in seasons is really on its way. Soon, the lovely liquid warble of American Robins singing their dusk songs will convince me spring is finally here.

A male Red-winged Blackbird

Port Norris

This evening, a trio of us spent a frigid 90 minutes scanning the marshes along the Maurice River as part of Cape May Bird Observatory's annual wintering raptor survey. Fingers went numb in a manner of minutes, and the three of us hopped and jumped and jogged in place and did calisthenics between our timed scans, trying to keep warm. It made me wonder how waterbirds cope; how can they stand having their unfeathered legs and feet in the frozen mud and icy water at this time of year?

North along the Maurice River

Westward across the salt marsh

Snow Geese gathered as dusk approached.

Another day, another river

[Sorry for the delay in posting my Guyana pictures/diary. Internet connections here are very slow and uploading even small picture files is problematic.]

Surama village sprawls across a patch of savanna on the fringe of the vast Iwokrama Forest. This morning, we walked from the village's eco-lodge (one of the oldest in the country) through several miles of tall, dense gallery forest to the Buro-Buro River for a quiet paddle in a big aluminum canoe. En-route, we flushed a Lesser Nighthawk off the edge sandy track we were walking; it exploded off the ground practically under our feet and flashed off to a nearby tree, where it settled on one of the lowest branches (see below). It was only when we finished taking our pictures and started down the road again that we discovered that she'd been sitting on a single, sparsely spotted white egg.

The Buro-Buro is a much smaller river than any of the others we've explored since arriving in Guyana. Narrow and placid, it twists through taller forest, with tree branches stretching down to the water's surface and vines twining overhead. There are traces of much higher waters along the banks -- debris tangled in branches far overhead, the dark shadows of watermarks well up the trunks, the occasional uprooted tree -- but today it was easy going.

Long-nosed Bats clung to the side of a boulder in midstream.

Chattering groups of White-banded Swallows gathered on twigs and deadfall all along the river.

South to Surama

[Sorry for the delay in posting my Guyana pictures/diary. Internet connections here are very slow and uploading even small picture files is problematic.]

A night of heavy rain turned our battered road into a muddy, greasy quagmire today, and we slipped and slithered our way south to Surama village. A handful of vehicles passed us as we birded along the road and one managed to splash an impressively large curtain of brown slime through an open window into one of our trucks. After that, we pedestrians retreated much further off the road whenever anyone approached, I can assure you!

This snoozing Great Potoo was a late afternoon highlight near Surama; it's amazing how effective its plumage and stance are at camouflaging the bird's outline. (The bird's in the middle of the picture, in case you're having trouble finding it.)

This was one of my many little roommates, which spent most of the evening hanging on a wall in the bathroom. I have no idea what species it is.

On the road (and river) again

[Sorry for the delay in posting my Guyana pictures/diary. Internet connections here are very slow and uploading even small picture files is problematic.]

We spent another day on Guyana's torturously bad "main highway", traversing the length of the Iwokrama Forest Reserve on our way to the Iwokrama River Lodge. It took much of the morning -- and a goodly part of the afternoon -- but we did stop a few times to stretch our legs, take some respite from the interminable painful bumps and see what we could find. We couldn't match the other day's Harpy Eagle, but we did find a few bits and pieces to enjoy.

A male Guianan Streaked-Antwren rummages through the roadside vegetation.

At dusk, we ventured out onto the mighty Essequibo River to look for nightbirds and caimans. The water, though deep, was as flat and still as a mirror, which made for some nice photos.

A day in the Rupununi

The Rupununi Savanna is a sprawling, 5000-square-mile expanse in the southwestern corner of Guyana. Most of it is grassland, dried and weatherbeaten at this time of year, lush and green (reportedly) during the summer rainy season. Islands of gallery forest dot the flat plains, and there are traces everywhere of wet season watercourses. Cracked mud crunches underfoot when you walk across now-dry ponds, shorebirds and ducks cluster in remnant pools full of water hyacinth, and islands of gallery forest stand green and lush in low spots and depressions all across the landscape. We're in the very northern part of the savanna, so we can see the ringing hills and mountains, hazy in the distance. After a morning wandering across the sere landscape, we spent another afternoon along the Rupununi River, the main waterway (and highway) through much of the savanna.

A pair of Jabiru, huge "man-sized" storks (as a friend always referred to them), stand atop their sizable nest in one of the savanna's wet spots.

A Cocoi Heron along the Rupununi River.

Dusk along a bend in the river.

Mahaica River

Today we arose before dawn and journeyed southeastward on a narrow two-lane highway hugging Guyana's coastline. Our destination was the Mahaica River, one of the country's smaller drainages. Narrow and placid, it flows through scattered small farms, lined with rice fields and edged with the tangled scrubby vegetation that Guyana's national bird, the bizarre, primitive Hoatzin, favors. Unfortunately, the rain was steady and unrelenting through much of the morning.

Our boatman, Narish, is a farmer along the Mahaica. He loves the Hoatzins, and works to convince his neighbors to maintain some habitat for them.

This Limpkin truly was limping; it only appeared to have one working leg. The injury didn't seem to be hindering it much, as it was still pulling earthworms from this wet field with surprising frequency.

An afternoon visit to Georgetown's botanical gardens brought views of a tree full of courting Great Egrets. Those spectacular plumes almost led to the species' demise in the early part of the last century, when it became fashionable to decorate women's hats with feathers. Whole colonies were destroyed for the millinery trade.

Georgetown

Georgetown, Guyana is a bustling metropolis, and our hotel sits at a busy intersection along one of the main roads through town. All day -- and much of the night -- the traffic hurtles past, a constant stream of taxis, minibuses and the occasional horse-drawn cart. And yet, despite all the hustle and commotion, a host of birds uses the shallow channelized river that runs between the lanes of the highway, and the narrow strips of grass that edge the road. There are two baby Striated Herons, their plumage still studded with wispy down feathers, huddled on a branch right across from my balcony. At least four Snail Kites are visiting the canal, flying off with snails clutched in their sharp beaks, then returning for another mouthful. Pairs of Orange-winged Parrots are shrieking overhead, and nearly every television antenna sports a Great Kiskadee or two. We've counted 20 species from the hotel; we daren't venture further under orders from our local guide.

Looking east along Croal Street. There are no buildings higher than ten stories here because of a thick clay layer that makes it difficult to drive footings deep enough to support anything taller.

A young Snail Kite waits its turn at the canal.

This Gray-lined Hawk was hunting in the backyards across the street.

Alias Smith, no Jones

I was in the shower when the text came this morning, saying that the Smith's Longspur had been seen again at Stone Harbor Point. Mike hammered on the door, imploring me to hurry. I did take a few minutes to dry my hair  (it was well below freezing, after all) and then we raced across the back bays. By the time we arrived, the troops had already marshaled, and we could see distant birders swiveling and pirouetting as the bird moved around them. A few minutes quick march, and we joined them on the frozen, gale-blasted beach, training our binoculars and scopes on the prize -- a rather nondescript little brown job shuffling along through the sand and snow. I feel a little sorry for it; this certainly isn't anything like the balmy lower Mississippi River valley where it normally overwinters!