Shane Blodgett and I fortuitously met at Coney Island Creek Park this morning for morning flight. Although the conditions had most passerines jumping north to Drier Offerman instead of heading west along the beach there were still some interesting sightings. At about 7:30am a large flock of birds descended from an extremely high altitude heading in a WSW direction. Through binoculars the birds gave off the appearance of a tight flock of terns or skimmers, alternately gliding and banking en masse. We quickly got the birds in our scopes only to realize they were in fact Greater Yellowlegs! our estimate of the total number was 225 birds. Having never seen a group that size we spent what little time we had them in view trying to disprove our identification and were unable to do so. The birds clearly exhibited uniform gray upperparts and head/neck, no wing stripes, light rumps, trailing legs and straight bills.
This certainly made us shift gears and watch the bay more intently. In doing so it quickly became apparent that terns were moving in numbers north into the Lower NY Bay. We began counting the terns and over the next 90 minutes tallied 1324 Common Tern, 32 Forster's Tern and 1 Black Tern. During this time all birds were moving north and as soon as we noticed any birds milling or moving back south we stopped the count to avoid duplication. The full Ebird checklist can be viewed at this link: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S25153866 Good birding, Sean Sime Brooklyn, NY -- 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/ --
