Friday 3 October 2014

They think its all over...

Well sadly it nearly is :-(

With no warbler flight in sight we decided to spend the morning banding with Patti. The right decision as we had the best morning of the trip.

Although we were not getting big catches, there was a really nice selection of birds. I was very happy as I got to band a black & white warbler along with northern waterthrush, several American redstart, eastern phoebe and a couple of yellowthoats.

Two net rounds stick out. The first held only 3 birds but it was magic extracting 2 American redstarts and the B&W warbler! The second was a net of 4 red eyed vireos or that is what we thought. Turned out that one of them was smaller and lacking the bold head pattern of red eyed. It turned out to be a warbling vireo, the 5th species of vireo on the trip!

As we were finishing Patti called one of the raptor banders to see how their morning was going. It had been very quiet but he had just caught a peregrine. 5mins later we were looking at a stunning juv male. I was surprised at how small the bird actually was in the hand. We took a few pics and away it went.

Decided to have a last look at Higbee Wood in the afternoon.  Things were pretty quiet but we did find a lovely little feeding flock of 10 tufted titmouse, 5 carolina chickadee, 3 black & white, magnolia, male black throated blue warbler, couple of red eyed vireo and an ovenbird! Not a bad flock... ;-)

Pic 1-2 - eastern phoebe
Pic 3 - carolina wren
Pic 4 - 1st yr female common yellowthroat
Pic 5 - warbling (left) and red eyed vireos
Pic 6-7 - warbling vireo
Pic 8 - red eyed vireo
Pic 9-10 northern waterthrush
Pic 11-14 - juvenile male peregrine caught by the raptor banders
Pic 15-16 - last evening walk along the beach with the black skimmer flock for company :-)

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