Nicaragua!

In the midst of a cold, snow, desolate and unfriendly winter, the best thing that one can do to beat the perma-grey blues is to escape. And that is just what I did in the middle of January. From the 12th to the 16th I took off from Miami with some friends from south Florida for warmer parts unknown.

I can't say that the prospect of seeing parrots in the wild was a deterrent in any way either... wink.

It just so happens that a buddy of mine from Oregon owns a surf business down there ( www.surftoursnicaragua.com is the website and you can check it out) and it was really good to get to see him and all that his business has to offer. I have to say that he is doing a great job down there and we had a great time hanging out with him for as long as we could. Sadly, we had to move on and Joe and Sean and I headed up the coast halfway into our trip to find a house that Joe had rented or us.

It may be hindsight that encouraged me to buy my very first language program online, but I realize that I am never going back there unless I can speak Spanish! (And I have plans to take Sarah there next year)

*Pause for a collective sigh from the parental units*

The country was beautiful and warm and when you get away from the city the people are all very friendly and caring. We stayed at a little house near a town called Chinandego on the north shore of Nicaragua. View where we were at here http://maps.google.com/maps?f=s&ie=UTF8&ll=12.291701,-86.572266&spn=1.341781,2.136841&t=p&z=9 as you can see, there was a large lake when we landed in the capital city of Managua (I've never been to an airport where a plane lands and then has to turn around on the runway to get to the terminal) and for the entire drive NW we were seeing volcanoes out of our right window.

The house that we stayed in was gorgeous and we got to surf and play around on the beach during the day. The caretakers of the house, Wilmer and Coco were fantastic hosts and spoiled us with oranges each morning and coconuts picked from the trees in the yard in the afternoons. My buddy Joe had a god time chasing the family chickens and Sean enjoyed talking to the parrots. Myself, I got to bird. Even on a limited time frame and in slightly urban areas, I managed to add 14 species to my life list. Great names down there too: Tropical Kingbird (my favorite), Turquoise-browed Motmot, White-throated Magpie-Jay, Rufous-naped Wren, Cinnamon Hummingbird, Red-lored Parrot, Blue-black Grassquit, Bare-throated Tiger-heron, Violet Sabrewing and Cinnamon-bellied Flower-piercer it's enough to tangle your tongue and allow your imagination to run rampant.

On to Mattamuskeet

Now we are finally caught up to this year! On Sunday the 4th of January (there was hunting on the 3rd) we had our second installment of the Winter Waterfowl Tour series at OBCWE. This time we travelled down to Lae Mattamuskeet NWR to catch a glimpse at all it has to offer there. Fortunately enough, we were joined by Bruce Freske who is the Refuge Manager and we were given the rare opportunity to head down to Lake Landing (a closed area) during the peak of winter staging.

What we got to see was incredible. 10,000+ Snow Geese, Northern Pintails, Bufflehead, Wigeon, Canvasbacks, Tundra Swans, Hooded Merrgansers and Bald Eagles galore... just to name a few. It also seems that interest in the trips has also turned way up. We were at peak capacity at twenty participants, a far cry from the eleven of the first trip. I anticipate that the Mackay trip in February will be even more full.

All told, I tacked 49 species on the day. Not too bad considering that everyone got to see all 49. The best by far on the day had to be the Snow Geese, just so many in one place.

Been a while...

So, once again I have been terrible about blogging. Mom, the next 20 minutes of reading are for you.

Gracious I might even have to get out a calendar for this one. Luckily I have the constant chattering of Maverick's Purple Martin to keep me company as I type away here. And speaking of Maverick, he had a fantastic Christmas at the Falkowski residence in PA. He got to play in the snow much that I thought he might come in from playing encased in a cube of iced heaven. I also got to do a bit of birding at Presque Isle one day with Sarah. She got to try out her new camera on the ice dunes that are relatively famous there, and I got to hunt down a series of lifers. Life birds at PI for me included: White-winged Scoter (a type of duck that likes it cooooold), Common Goldeneye (another duck and apprpriately named), Black-capped Chckadees (we have Carolina's in the South) and an American Tree Sparrow.

I also got one other lifer on the trip when we went to visit Sarah's friends Angela and Phil, (who are pregnant and due in June) a Common Merganser. We had walked out on Woodcock dam which is relatively near their house and I spotted a whole host of the things congregated out on the (cold) water.

We had a very nice Christmas and I am pretty sure that it snowed enough for me to have my fill until next year (it was 3 degrees when we went out one night!). Above and below are some pictures from Presque Isle and birding on the ice dunes.

Common Eider

Apparently there has been a Common Eider down at Oregon Inlet this past week, I have not had a chance to check it out yet, but I will head down there this afternoon and keep you posted. Below is a picture of a female from the Cornell Lab site All about Birds http://www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds.

Sparrow Roundup

This past Saturday, we had our first Coastal Plains Swamp Sparrow Roundup. Ray Danner, a PhD student with the Avian Ecology lab at Virginia Tech, agreed to let volunteers through the NCWRC assist with his preleminary research near Swan Quarter, NC. Myself and six others were on hand entirely too early in the morning and in desperate need of coffee. We began by hearing a little about Ray's project and what his aims are. Basically, the coastal plains subspecies of the Swamp Sparrow is being studied because of its unique environmental constraints. It winters in only a small area, summers in only a small area and acts in a way that distances itself from other Swamp Sparrow's. One peculiarity is in its feeding methods, rooting around in the mud in addition to seed eating, so much to the point that many of the dubious critters have their beaks slathered with muck. Strange, but Ray says that this may be the beginnings of a new evolutionary divergence that has already manifested itself and created similar attributes in Seaside Sparrows.

Whew, that being out of the way, we progressed to the fun stuff. Normally when out biriding, bird-equette requires those participating to adopt a state of near silence in order to "keep an ear out". This day, however, was entirely different. Shouting and stamping, blurting and belting, rousing choruses of "Grandma got run over by a Reindeer" lit the morning with a foul din as we actively engaged in a process called flush-netting to scare the sparrows into nets we had set up. Ray justified this practice saying they had tried passive netting where bird simply wander into the nets, but this is usually done at dawn when the birds are trying to reach their feeding grounds as opposed to when they are already there, which is what we were doing. Personally, I'd much rather be bothered at work than have my boss yell at me for being late, but I digress.

We had some success and ended up with 6 birds to process, 3 of which had been banded previously (Ray had done one himself in the same spot last year). Getting to see these birds up close was a very unique opportunity and I hope that we will be able to repeat it sometime in the coming months. Ray is planning on being here for at least the nex three months, and I hope his research goes well. By the way, I've put a slide shoe up of the Sparrow Roundup pictures to the right, click on the thumbnails to see the full size shots and make sure to check out Sarah with the House Wren.

12/6/08 Pea Island

The Winter Waterfowl Tours are a new program here at the Outer Banks Center for Wildlife Education and they are focusing on the wintering waterfowl populations in Northeastern NC. I got to pick three sites to visit, one each in December, January and February, and we just had our first one on Saturday at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. We had a very good showing and our trip commenced at 8 am from the Pea Island visitor's center with a party of 9 in tow.

Right off the bat we scored numerous ducks and over 200 swans, it was all I could do to get my introduction out the ponds were so full of birds. Luckily, we had a surprise guest in Jeff Lewis who helped spot some really key species on the day. The group headed down to the main overlook at the south end of North Pond and we were not disappointed. Buffleheads, Red-breasted and Hooded Mergansers, Tundra Swans, Snow Geese, Mallards, Black Ducks, Scaup, a raft of Redheads 400 strong and countless Ruddies greeted us within the first 30 minutes. Not that it let up from there.

We were well blessed with a beautiful day in the high 50's with clear skies and virtually no wind, which made finding the Black Scoter's, Lesser Black Backed Gulls and Red Throated Loons on the ocean all the easier. To those of you who haven't signed up for one of our trips yet, please do, it is much more fun with plenty of eyes to help with the spotting.

The trip ended up at the south end of the Bonner Bridge across Oregon Inlet. There is a jetty there and I wanted to have a see for Purple Sandpiper, a little shorebird with an affinity for rocky shores and rougher waves. This makes it difficult to find on the southeast Atlantic Coast unless you know where to look. These little birds are extremely charasmatic, even though they mostly sleep, and they winter further north than other sandpipers. Still something of a migrational feat since they breed on Baffin Island and Axel Heiberg Island near the artic circle. I happened to snap a few pictures of this one sleeping before I discovered that a friend was hanging out directly below. Beautiful little birds, especially that gold wash that seems to rim the outer edges of the scapular feathers.

Surf Scoter in Corolla

Once again I have been negligent in my blogging duties, but I have a slew of updates and can't wait to share them. Number one: We have had a Surf Scoter in Corolla for almost the past week. I first discovered it on December 4th and have called up a few friends to snap some quality photographs of it since I am lacking in the picture taking department. As you can see, the male is a beautiful, yet silent, duck with a a very Aquiline bill that is a multitude of colors paired with a blank black canvas of its back. A showstopper, no doubt.

It's not strange that the bird is here in Corolla, its just where it is in Corolla. The bird has taken up residence in a small freshwater pond across the street from the TimBukII shopping plaza. Strange since Sibley tells us that the bird is "common on open salt water, usually near rocks; uncommon to rare inland" . So the Scoter, aptly named for its tendency to forage in ocean surf and breaking waves, is definitely lost in the very small retaining pond in front of an ocean housing complex. Below is a picture of the pond where the Scoter is currently residing.