Sue and I traveled out to Montauk Pt. this morning hoping to repeat the alcidfest of Sunday and perhaps snag one of the more uncommon alcids. Little did we know that one of the alcids we were looking for was fifteen minutes from our home swimming in a marina. At Montauk Point we saw little of the previous Razorbill extravaganza, observing only 65 individuals (a good total for most winters, but not this winter), an unidentified large alcid along with twelve Black-legged Kittiwakes. Our best bird at the Point was a Yellow-breasted Chat feeding in the bushes along the road by the entrance to the Money Pond Trail. The ocean on the south side of the Point was a sea of foam today - good for surfers, not for birds. Ditch Plains was a complete washout, with one or two Common Eider taking a beating from the pounding waves. We headed back to the Point (north side) around noon and found a female King Eider off the restaurant. In the early afternoon we received phone calls from Dave Klauber and Shai Mitra that a Dovekie was in the west marina at the Timber Point Golf Course in Great River. All this time we were looking for Dovekies on the ocean when we should have been searching local marinas! We cancelled all our scheduled stops on the way home and headed straight for Great River. Upon our arrival the bird was swimming adjacent to a bank of Phragmites on the west side of the marina. Congratulations to Ken Thompson on his great find and a new entry in the future edition of "Obscure Places to Find Rare Alcids on Long Island".
Ken Feustel -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html 3) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
