Field Ornithology: Day 2

I went to Shelburne Bay and the LaPlatte River trail this morning. It was chilly and 57 degrees when I got there then got very humid and hot by 10am which was about 68 degrees. When I got there all of the shorebirds were flying around and making a lot of noise, so it was hard to pinpoint every single bird that was calling or moving. My target habitat for the day was grassland and shrubland, however there was not a lot of grassland, it was more forest/water/marsh/shrub land. I got to see a Black-crowned Night-Heron which I was super excited about! I was on the lookout for it, but I only saw it as I was leaving. I had a lot of wrens and flycatchers following me. There was a flycatcher super close to me but I couldn't see it so I identified it's call as a Great Crested Flycatcher and it took me about 20 minutes of chasing it around to actually see it. A lot of birds were fighting today, there was an Osprey chasing and nipping at a Great Blue Heron which was kind of crazy to see. I also saw some mallards with their young sitting on the shore and some Canada Geese came up and started a fight with the male mallard and then they just ended up sitting next to each other after. I went from shore habitat to some grassland then across the street to forest and shrubland habitat. I saw most of my shore birds out by the water, but I did find some in the river bay (mostly herons and egrets). There were a lot of flycatchers I could not identify and some high pitched etherial calls which were all hard to take recordings of, so I'm not sure if they were identified right. I was actually able to identify a lot more birds than I thought today, especially warblers and a few shorebirds I just learned the calls of yesterday. One funny thing is thatI was taking some photos of an egret when I heard the call of a Killdeer and RAN towards it across the parking lot with no shame because I had never seen one up close before, so that was really cool. I was hoping for more shrub and grassland birds, but their calls started to die down as I wrapped around onto that shrubby part of the trail, so I'll have to go back another time to find them. My scariest part of today was that a Yellow Warbler FLEW so close passed my ear that I could feel the wind from it, so that was almost fatal. It was really windy today and there were a few jets flying overhead so it was hard to hear and record calls at times, but overall it was a very successful day!

Posted on May 26, 2021 12:31 AM by