Ron Pittaway just released his latest winter finch forecast. The full text of his forecast is below. For PA, it looks like Purple Finches and Common Redpolls will be moving south and we will hoepfully find good numbers of both. Red-breasted Nuthatches are also moving south this year. Finches such as the crossbills, Pine Grosbeak and Evening Grosbeak are forecast to stay north where seed crops were good this year. Ron Pittaway’s Winter Finch Forecast 2010-2011 This winter’s theme is that some finch species will irrupt into southern Canada and the northern United States, while other species will remain in the north. As an example, Common and Hoary Redpolls will move south whereas Pine Grosbeaks will stay in the north. See individual finch forecasts below for details. Three irruptive non-finch passerines are also discussed.
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It’s been in the App Store for several months at this point but it is definitely high time that I review the excellent bird listing app, Birdcountr (iTunes link; $4.99). This is a category of birding app that has been largely unfulfilled up to this point. As a disclaimer, I was a beta tester for this app as it was being developed but I have no financial or other involvements in the app. That being said, I hope I can convince you that this is the only way you should be recording your bird sightings if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch. At first glance, this app is a simple listing app, and that simplicity is part of the beauty of the app. Pressing the Start A List button leads you to the GPS page (if you have an iPhone).
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It’s been hot the last couple days and that really has shut down bird song after about 9am. Luckily today was a little cooler and that really helped. I am in Adams and Franklin counties and grassland birds are quite common, especially compared to areas with more intensive agriculture like Lancaster County. One of the more interesting sightings recently was near Shady Grove in Franklin County. Eurasian Collared-Doves are easily found right in the town but I came across two pairs outside of town. Other common birds on recent surveys are Field Sparrows and Indigo Buntings.
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The summer has been busy so far, with road road surveys across a 20 county region in central Pennsylvania. Highlights have been Henslow’s Sparrows in Bedford County, Red-headed Woodpeckers in Franklin County and Blue Grosbeaks in at least four counties. I also found a male Dickcissel singing from a hayfield in eastern Lancaster County. Most of the days I have been too busy in the morning to get any pictures of the birds I have been seeing, but I did manage this Savannah Sparrow that perched on the wire at the Mt. Pleasant Road pond in Lebanon County. In the photo below, a Purple Martin perched on the same wire but I couldn’t manage as good of a shot because of how dark it is and the high amount of backlighting.
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I felt like I was hearing a lot of Blackpoll Warblers earlier than expected this year so I dug thru some data on eBird and found that they are actually right on time. First reports start coming in the first week of May if you look at the average birds reported per hour over all the years that have been entered into the eBird database. Click to zoom in on the graph. It looks like we can expect the big push to come in the first week of June. I wonder if that first little bump is due to the excitement of seeing them for the first time, which wears off after a week or so.
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Real quick, here are some pictures of the female Tufted Duck. I also made a google map of the site and it is below the images.
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David Allen Sibley, author of the incredibly useful Sibley Guide to Birds of North America has just added another publication. The Sibley eGuide to Birds of North America is an iPhone/iPod Touch app that takes all the information from his popular print guides and adds bird calls for each species as well as several other useful features to create a very portable edition of his guide. Ever since I first began using the Sibley guides, I have been continuously impressed with how accurately he portrayed the birds in various poses, both perching and flying, and at different ages. There have been numerous occasions when I read about a “new” field mark to use, only to look in Sibley and it is already perfectly illustrated. He also shows the wide range of variation exhibited by many species of birds.
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I drove around Lancaster County farm fields near New Holland and Leola looking for any field birds I could find. Other birders have reported seeing up to 5 Lapland Longspurs in the Horned Lark flocks and there is always the possibilities of Snow Buntings as well. I missed the more interesting field birds, but did manage to find several large flocks of Horned Larks that were pushed closer to the road and feeding on any bare strip of ground they could find. At one point, a merlin strafed the flock and perched on a post near me. All these photos I took out of my car window, holding the scope by hand.
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Today I spent a few hours searching for interesting gulls near the landfill at Tullytown. Lesser Black-backed Gulls were pretty easy to come by and I also saw a first-winter Iceland and a first-winter Glaucous Gull. I then came across an interesting gull. It piqued my interest due to the dark area around the eyes, coloration of the bill and what I thought was a longer primary extension. In the end, the pink legs and light colored iris point to this just being a well marked American Herring Gull. It’s always neat to see the variation that Herring Gulls are capable of. This bird is likely either a 3rd cycle gull or a 4th cycle gull, due to several darker tertials and the darker bill color.
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