In addition to their obvious relevance for year-listers, I suspect the Cattle Egrets in Brooklyn and at Mecox are nudging birders' memories of other, similar patterns of occurrence. These birds' simultaneous appearance demonstrates again the tendency of unusual birds to occur in bunches--and very often with no obvious weather mechanism "driving" them from where they were to where they are now.
When Rob Jett reported a Cattle Egret in Brooklyn in November 2009-- http://citybirder.blogspot.com/2009/11/november-madness.html --I suggested that the followup oughtn't merely be a re-check of Floyd Bennett Field, but rather an immediate search of the fields at Mecox, 90 miles to the east. My reasoning was that Cattle Egrets had co-occurred in 2008 on Staten Island and at Mecox, and that a Cattle Egret at Mecox the year before that had, indirectly, helped to prompt one of the most frenzied bouts of rarity-finding that anyone could remember-- http://www.nybirds.org/Publications/KB58no1_HowWeAllGoBirding.pdf The upshot in November 2009 was that Pat Lindsay went ahead and checked Mecox the day after Rob's Brooklyn bird, showing off good measures of daring and style in her chosen mode of bird-chasing. She duly discovered a Cattle Egret precisely where she expected to find it. Shai Mitra Bay Shore ________________________________ Washington Monthly<http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2012/features/americas_bestbangforthebuck_co039461.php> magazine ranks the College of Staten Island as one of “America’s Best-Bang-for-the-Buck Colleges” -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
