Sunday 17 February 2013

Upstate New York: Welcome to the arctic!

I've been cold in recent years but never as cold as I was today birding around Upstate New York not a million miles from Cortland - at least four hours drive west of NYC.
 Brrrrr!!
 Double brrrrr! TUB with Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Matthew Young
 Treble brrrrrrr!!
 Blue Jay
 Black-capped Chickadee
 Horned Lark
 Singing Horned Lark
 Female Mealy Redpoll
 Mealy Redpoll
 White-breasted Nuthatch
Male Evening Grosbeak
Despite the biting cold I had a fabulous day birding mostly visiting bird feeding stations dotted around the vicinity. We saw maybe six Hoary (or Arctic) Redpolls and at least 600 Mealy Redpolls including around 300 close up nervous birds at one feeding station!

We also saw at least 60 Evening Grosbeaks - a lifer for me. Annoyingly, my camera battery conked out quite early on and I missed several brilliant opportunties to photograph this gorgeous relative of the Hawfinch at close range. Other great birds included a horde of Horned (Shore) Larks, a magnificent Rough-legged Hawk (Buzzard) and a couple of Snow Buntings seen in an arctic snow blizzard that suddenly kicked up.

Give me hot weather any day!

1 comment:

StourbridgeRantBoy said...

Glad to see you are still seeing some nice stuff. Rich Bonser's in California at present, what a contrast with the weather.

The rain has stopped here and we have had a bit of sun over the last few days but it's going much cooler the second half of the week particularly the Southern half of Britain....

ATB Laurie -