6BY3: Quarterly Report

Our recent vacation was scheduled around both ends of a long weekend: a birding ecostudies trip on Monhegan Island in Maine. We normally don’t splurge on such things, but a former neighbor of mine was one of the leaders, and we couldn’t pass on the combination of birds/time spent with her.

Without those birding experts, we would never have been able to identify the confusing fall warblers in their nonbreeding plumage. Nor would we have been sure of certain sparrows or sparrowlike species. With hired guides, my annual totals go up, without question.

The group as a whole listed 100 birds or so; I listed 73 species for the trip, adding 22 species to my 2017 list (although here I will tell you only about 19, as the last day of the trip was October 1, the first day of the next quarter. I am sure you can’t wait to hear what those last three were.) (And, for the record, one bird on the list was a species I had seen/heard multiple times but somehow had failed to list during the second quarter.)

Highlights for me were seeing gannets (always a highlight for me), watching a snipe feed by a pond, and observing so many raptors. The most fun sighting of the quarter may have been the gray jays we ran into in the Adirondacks in early September. But that’s another story.

Without further ado, here’s the list: common tern, black-throated green warbler, gray jay, red-breasted nuthatch, palm warbler, greater yellowlegs, lesser yellowlegs, northern gannet, black guillemot, laughing gull, peregrine falcon, great cormorant, sharp-shinned hawk, merlin, blue-headed vireo, golden-crowned kinglet, ruby-crowned kinglet, American pipit, clay-colored sparrow, white-throated sparrow, Cape May warbler, blackpoll warbler, dickcissel, Savannah sparrow, Lincoln’s sparrow, rusty blackbird.

Year-to-date count at this quarter: 141. (2012: 110. 2013: 173 [which turned out to be that year’s total]. 2014: 116. 2015: 124. 2016: 113.)