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While on our beach vacation in the Outer Banks of NorthCarolina in early April I took full advantage of our location just off the beach. My favorite experience was on a day with really strong south winds. Terns, gulls, pelicans, gannets, and ducks all made their way past and all were digiscoped to within an inch of their lives.
I saw my first Swainson’s Warbler in eastern NorthCarolina, along the Roanoke River near the town of Weldon. The story is etched into my memory not for my experience with the bird, which was an obstructed view of a singing male through a mess of dense underbrush at about 100 feet, but for the effort it took to get there.
In my experience, I’ve noted how birders, particularly newer birders, can have a tendency to jump to conclusions when they see any sort of bird that doesn’t match up perfectly with the picture in the field guide. New Jersey mystery sparrow.
A couple weekends ago I headed out to the Carolina Bird Club’s winter meeting in Nags Head, NorthCarolina, on the cusp of the Outer Banks. This is my second ridiculous mink experience. Birding NorthCarolina Outer Banks' All in all a fun trip. I’ll be back to close out 200 soon.
Sitta canadensis isn’t just irrupting out of its far northern home but exploding southward, with reports in every southern state except for Florida, including birds on the outer banks of NorthCarolina, on Grand Isle, Louisiana, in a suburb of Atlanta, and on the Gulf Coast of Texas. Bird bloggers from Wisconsin to Massachusetts.
Way down in the Florida they have the bizarre Snail Kite and the gorgeous Swallow-tailed Kite , both of which have made their way up as far north as NorthCarolina, though the former only once. We in the south are stuffed silly with kites. This is a bird that does not mess around.
If I want my children to be birders, or at least to appreciate birding, I need them to have good experiences doing it with me. But sometimes the stars align perfectly, as they did a couple weeks ago, in the form of NorthCarolina’s first record of Townsend’s Solitaire.
The Delmarva Peninsula juts southward towards NorthCarolina like the appendix of the eastern seaboard. It’s southernmost third, given to Virginia by accident of history rather than geopolitical intention, lies apart from the rest of the state both culturally and geographically.
“This beautiful and singular bird, although a constant resident in the southern extremities of the peninsula of Florida, seldom extends its journeys in an eastern direction beyond the State of NorthCarolina.
You see, “spring” in the sense that birders in the far northern reaches experience it, has been happening here in the south for the better part of three months. Nothing says “real” spring like the first burst of piercing slurry whistles from down a NorthCarolina stream.
Got to finish browsing for the fawns and collecting chiggers,” wrote Becky, from an island off NorthCarolina. “I don’t want to be too hasty in my response,” wrote Gay in Virginia. Let me ponder it while I’m picking up two gulls and an egret.”. No one wished for diamonds, fast cars, or penthouse apartments. “I’d
Though we were almost rained out, my graduation Outer Banks trip will remain a highlight of my time in NorthCarolina. Not only did I see beautiful landscapes and great birds, but I could share the experience with my family.
The birding in NorthCarolina, for reasons both of my own making and the vagaries of southern “winter” weather, has been a bit slow. Please come by and hang out, say hello, chat about what you’re seeing and where you’ve been and share any particularly great birding experiences you’ve had at Space Coast.
He is a current member of the NorthCarolina Bird Records Committee and an eBird coordinator for NorthCarolina. We need more publishers of quality birding books and more birder-writers offering fresh views, sharing their experiences, covering new, niche subjects.
Not long ago I was down on the southern coast of NorthCarolina, staked out with a group of birders seawatching on a long concrete pier on Wrightsville Beach. Assuming that I would hear if the Pac Loon showed up, I turned to the quartet of turnstones working the pier for bits of fish scraps.
The search for the next new bird is that much more fulfilling when you’re limited to the smallest of the arbitrary political boundaries in the United States, and the search for those birds necessitates a broad working knowledge of the county of the sort that can only be attained through experience. You simply cannot go wrong.
But at a hotel in Roanoke Rapids, NorthCarolina, he had a singing male Eastern Bluebird on Sunday morning, and that was definitely his Best Bird of the Weekend. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment. How about you? What was your best bird of the weekend?
” Despite the cruel, cold weather I was out and about on both Saturday and Sunday morning, despite the added cruelty of just having returned from (slightly) warmer NorthCarolina late on Friday night. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment.
We took in a bit of the Disney experience this time down – it’s hard to avoid it with young children and doting grandparents – and even I cannot deny the skill at which the Disney corporation packages and sells nostalgia. It’s stressful, and can turn even the most mild-mannered civilian into a raging misanthrope.
In other words, eBird is effectively a complete history of my birding experiences. A pelagic out of Hatteras, NorthCarolina , the Biggest Week in American Birding in Ohio , and trip to Puerto Rico stand out as well. Our honeymoon in the U.S Virgin Islands ( St. John and St. Thomas ) was good for 26 lifers.
I’ve taken tours out of Monterey Bay (with pelagic legend Debi Shearwater , now retired) and Half Moon Bay, California ; Newport, Oregon ; and Hatteras, NorthCarolina. That is, incidentally, my universal experience on pelagics, as everyone has been very good and very experienced on all my trips.)
There were ten students in total that had signed up for the spring break “Seabirds” course in Dry Tortugas National Park, and after long drives down from NorthCarolina we had all made it right on time. Throughout the next three full days I would experience all of the jobs that go along with proper bird banding.
Research experiments are described without citing the names of the researchers themselves or any other background information. The authors themselves, Barbara Ballentine and Jeremy Hyman, are professors at Western Carolina University, a state university in Cullowhee, NorthCarolina.
My own birding experience in upstate New York this week was much more mundane, with dwindling numbers of Blackpoll Warblers signaling the end of spring migration and prompting my return to a normal sleep schedule. and the continental ABA area, but possibly the Atlantic Ocean itself.
One bird, the authors discovered, flew 5,000 miles nonstop from southern Brazil to NorthCarolina. If you have had the joy of birding the Delaware Bay (remember, this includes Cape May in New Jersey and Prime Hook in Delaware), what has been your most memorable experience?
Perhaps the best experience of the two days I spend offshore was not a bird, but a mammal. The depths of the North Atlantic are unknown and, in many ways, unknowable. Even in light winds, Black-capped Petrels are effortless and amazing. Pomarine Jaegers, some with long tail spoons, kept us company most of the second day.
Written in the tradition of the classic Hawks in Flight , but very much a product of the experiences of its birder authors, this is a groundbreaking book that offers a new way of identifying migratory birds at sea to all of us who observe the waters of eastern North America with expectation and excitement. Some maps are quite busy.
For the birder, this means that no matter how many Clapper Rails you have seen in the salt marshes of New Jersey, NorthCarolina, or Texas, that Clapper Rail that lurks in the Black Mangroves at Chomes, Costa Rica is going to be a different species. Check out recordings of Clapper Rail from North America and Costa Rica.
Given my west coast experience, I have made dedicated birding trips to several of the more predictable birding hotspots. I’ve also been on pelagic birding trips on both coasts, out of Half Moon Bay and Monterey, California; Newport, Oregon; and Hatteras, NorthCarolina. Geography is destiny.
In part, the problem Spectrum faced was that the competition allowed the exact same experience on multiple devices. The boxes actually give a better, more seamless experience than the apps. Level playing fields are fine, but when you had an incumbency advantage, why would you ever want to create a level playing field? . .
The Anchorage area hosts a number of far norther species I could never hope to see in NorthCarolina, and I quickly pulled together a list of targets and my friends made a plan. What an incredible experience. I’m not sure what I expected when I finally got a look at Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska.
NorthCarolina’s 2nd inland Pacific Loon was on Lake Townsend in 2008. CBCs are different than your run of the mill winter birding experience, because you’re generally going to be spending much more time out in the field that you usually do, and in weather that you might not usually choose to bird in. But are you?
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