Birds and Other Nature Sightings

    On Monday I birded my two favorite places, my yard and Island Beach State Park.  Now that June is upon us, much of last month’s migration activity has dwindled down and what’s here now as far as land birds is pretty much what will be so until late summer.  Nevertheless I still managed to find six flycatchers on the day.  One of the birds is always rare for our area and another is not easy to find during migration and now, post migration, is flagged as rare on eBird. The first bird I saw when I walked out my patio door in the morning was a large, backlit flycatcher high atop a dead tree snag.  A great crested flycatcher was calling in the general vicinity so at first that’s what I thought it was.  Yet something didn’t seem right for that ID.  I watched it for a few minutes and noticed it was much darker and wasn’t vocalizing when the great crested did.  I noticed it appeared to have a dark vest which turned my thoughts to an olive-sided f...

     This past Saturday I reached 2,500 consecutive days with at least one eBird checklist.  There are no awards or accolades for this, same as it is for those who must end the year with the most species for the county.  The streak is just a personal milestone, and I get to share some stats here as well. This streak started nearly seven years ago (6.84 to be more precise).  Mid-January of last year is when I hit 2,000 consecutive days.  In the past 500 days, I have submitted 922 checklists.  The checklists covered eight states and two oceans.  I listed around 340 different species, including eight new life birds.  The eight new birds were:   white-throated swift , Swinhoe’s white-eye , black oystercatcher , mitred parakeet , cave swallow , tundra bean-goose , Lazuli’s bunting and Bell’s vireo . Left, Swinhoe's white-eye in Manhattan Beach, CA.  Right, mitred parakeet in Long Beach, CA.   © S. Weiss Northern red bisho...