For the next two posts I owe thanks to my aunt Alice. Her house is surrounded by woods, and she maintains a diversity of feeders in her front and back yards: sunflower, nyjer, mixed seed, multiple suet blocks. I got some of my best photos of the trip just staking out on her back porch.


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Tufted Titmouse: the bird that makes everyone go "awwww!"




My first-ever decent shot of a male Eastern Bluebird. The species is often quite shy.

For the third year in a row, I've found a pair of Red-Shouldered Hawks wintering in a particular spot in my parents' neighborhood. The locals are even familiar with them now, asking me if I'm looking for "the hawks" when I walk by with my binoculars. This time I was able to get good photos of one of them.


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They seem to be filling the niche typically filled by accipiters (Sharp-Shinned and Cooper's Hawks) in Ottawa: namely, preying on suburban backyard birds. The one pictured was taking the rather cheeky approach of perching directly above a feeder.


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The classic watchful pose of the Northern Mockingbird. As it happens, this bird was in the same yard as the hawk, so he had good reason to be watchful!

Temperatures in excess of 15 degrees drew out flying insects---much to the delight of Pea Island's abundant wintering Yellow-Rumped Warblers. Unlike most warblers, Yellow-Rumpeds can survive on berries for long stretches (particularly wax myrtle berries, which they are specially evolved to digest), which is why they can winter well north of the tropics. But an influx of protein still makes their day. As my mother and I went down the boardwalk they were flycatching in the air all around us, sometimes perching on the railing for their next sally.



( More )

The Boat-Tailed Grackle, a supersize relative of the Common Grackle, is one of the characteristic birds of the south Atlantic coast. In winter they get very flocky, gathering on lawns, rooftops, sand dunes, and last but not least, feeders. A large group was patronizing the feeders at the Visitor Center, though they flushed into the vegetation as soon as I drew near.



The dominant wintering duck at Pea Island appears to be the Northern Pintail---they raft by the hundreds on open water. They're skittish when approached, though, so I wasn't able to get any good pictures of them. These female Buffleheads were somewhat more cooperative.



I was handicapped in my attempts to view and photograph waterfowl by the damage from Hurricane Irene. It broke the dam and all but emptied out North Pond, which is encircled by a public trail and normally teeming with ducks, geese and swans in winter. Reduced to mud flats and puddles, it wasn't very attractive to waterfowl anymore. It was just the right habitat for sandpipers though---particularly Dunlins.

( The triplist is, um, epic. )

Much of the epicness, of course, was thanks to Cape Hatteras. But the star of Cape Hatteras, for me, was not any sort of waterfowl, nor any sort of shorebird, nor any other bird one might associate with the coast. It was this:



The Eastern Meadowlark. In winter, when most of the bright yellow birds have flown to the tropics, and goldfinches have molted their yellow for dingy greyish-green, what a sight to see a meadowlark, as golden-breasted as ever! These birds, generally thought of as a rural species, occur year-round at Pea Island. In summer I hear them singing from the boardwalk.

More photos to come...

Wow, Outer Banks is seriously a ghost town in winter. I mean as regards people and businesses--no problem finding birds!

I had a great time, and the weather was so unseasonably warm that I didn't even need a jacket half the time. In fact the weather was so warm that I sustained multiple mosquito bites. This was North Carolina and not, say, Costa Rica, right?

Triplist now stands at 60 species.

...and the Cape Hatteras trip is, tentatively, a go. This weekend looks perfect for it.

I'm off to Virginia for two weeks. My mother wants help setting up her new computer. In my free time, I'll be hiking and birding and enjoying the southern climate. (Bird sightings will not count for my winterlist though--that'd be cheating!) As usual, I'm bringing both binos and camera, so expect a round of pictures when I get back.

If the weather is nice enough, my mom and I may do an overnight trip to Cape Hatteras. This would be my first time going to Outer Banks in a season other than summer, and I'm excited about it. It's a major haven for wintering waterfowl.

Northern Cardinal and female House Finch at my feeder on a blustery, wintry day.

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It's been a great year for winterlisting so far, with our mild weather encouraging many fall migrants to linger into December. I scooped up 29 species on the first plus six more last week, the most surprising being some lingering American Wigeons at Mud Lake, and several Red-Winged Blackbirds at the Hilda Road feeders.

I'm also enjoying the sunflower feeder I hung from our second-floor balcony--one of the pleasures of having a house instead of an 11th-floor apartment! So far the mainstay is chickadees and House Finches, but I've also seen a few cardinals and, on one occasion, goldfinches. It will be interesting to see how much business it gets after winter really sets in.

( Winterlist 2011 )