I did the Greene County portion of the statewide Waterfowl Count today. I actually started at Coeymans Landing, Albany County, as in many previous years. I finished at Smith's Landing, at the south end of the Town of Catskill.
Except for one or two open spots, the river was totally frozen over. So that made counting the ducks and geese a lot easier. The weather started out OK, but deteriorated quickly at about 1 30 in the afternoon. Then, rain, changing to sleet and freezing rain, prevented me from going down some rather steep access roads to good viewing spots. Not that that mattered much anyway, since i could see from a distance that the river was frozen there also. The tally was: Canada Geese: 160 (All in one field, not on the river); Wood Ducks: 2 (in a spring fed pond, again, away from the river.); Amer. Black Duck: 1 (alone on the ice way out on the river); Mallard: 14 (same pond as the Woodies); Common Mergansers: 50 (all in one of the patches of open water). In addition, there were: Bald Eagle: 6 Red-shouldered Hawk: 1 Red-tailed Hawk: 6 Ring-billed Gull: 18 Herring Gull: 19 and some expected common songbirds such as Blue Jays, Cardinals, Juncos and the like. I'll post this and a couple of so-so photos of the Red-shouldered Hawk on my blog: http://blog.timesunion.com/birding Rich Guthrie New Baltimore, The Greene County, New York -- Richard Guthrie -- 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/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/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/ --
