My dad and I spent some time this weekend birding the agricultural fields around Northville and Riverhead.
Despite struggling to find Cackling Geese around Long Island since late December, we had remarkable success this weekend. We had a single in the field west of Church Lane late on Friday afternoon. Yesterday morning, three were present in the field just north of Rt. 25 between Rt. 105 and Doctor's Path. Today, we had six - four in the field east of Osborne Ave (in the same flock found by Pete Morris and Taylor Sturm) and two along Roanoke Ave. We also had a Snow x Canada Goose hybrid on Osborne Ave. Unfortunately, we did not connect with the Pink-footed Goose this weekend.
After leaving Osborne Avenue this afternoon, we headed over to the Reeves Avenue Buffalo Farm in hopes of getting better photographs of the White-crowned Sparrows we had there on Saturday.
On Saturday, we had twelve here with two (an adult and an immature) appearing to be of the Gambel's race. We had a third individual that may have been of this subspecies.
We didn't see any White-crowns today, but there was very large flock of blackbirds at the farm. After scoping for several minutes, we connected with a female Yellow-headed Blackbird feeding on the road shoulder in front of our car. It flew off several seconds later, and we saw it only once more before the entire flock flew off to the far south end of the farm.
Photos of some of the weekend's highlights can be seen at: https://picasaweb.google.com/117391989476777248424/NewYorkBirds2014#
Good birding,
Michael McBrien
East Patchogue, NY
--
NYSbirds-L List Info:
Archives:
Please submit your observations to eBird!
--
