As a break from rare and uncommon birds, here are some observations of Brant, Ring-billed Gull, and Blue Jay.
There is currently a huge staging of Brant in southwestern LI--far in excess of the admittedly vast numbers present here during the winter. I estimated 9,000 in a single scan of the bays north of Lido Preserve in Nassau County on 1 May. Yesterday, Patricia Lindsay and I made our first trip around the newly restored West Pond at Jamaica Bay, Queens, and were simply amazed at the number of Brant covering all the visible portions of the bay south and west of the West Pond. It is extremely difficult to estimate numbers of birds over a large area when the local density varies, but we worked at it pretty hard. Pat made a serious argument for 100,000, and I convinced myself that the number could not be less than 30,000 but could easily be two to three times that number. We settled on 50,000. I took some photos and video of the birds visible through breaks in the vegetation along the west side of the pond, one of which is linked here: https://flic.kr/p/Tj61K5 Lesser Black-backed Gulls are swelling in numbers on Long Island, to the extent that they greatly outnumber Ring-billed Gull along the coast at present. In five reasonably conscientious efforts from the LI barrier beach over the past few days, I recorded at total of 17 LBBGs (4, 2, 0, 5, 6) vs. 4 RBGU (0, 0, 0, 2, 2). And then Pete Morris texted last night that there were 12 LBBGs in a nearly pure flock at Robert Moses SP, which I arrived in time to see. Now that the overall abundance of common larids has dropped so much from winter levels, I think it's a prime time to look for wandering immatures of locally rare species. I saw a Blue Jay at Jones Beach on 4 May, my first on the barrier beach since 23 Oct 2015. Shai Mitra Bay Shore -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm 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://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
