Is there a better way to spend a full moon, almost autumnal equinox Saturday?
William H Kaempfer
Sorry for posting without any geographical specifics in the title. This report is for a come-what-may day trip “out east”. Good birds, good weather, good birding friends….
John Vanderpoel and I started out early this morning to track down the Dunning/Kellner/Lawrence mega-numbers of Wilson’s Warblers at Norma’s Grove (Weld, WCR 100 X 57). Well today there were a few plus a few Yellow-rumps and a starling with a killer Sora imitation. Cassin’s Kingbirds (2) were still here (and at least one at Crow Valley and a fourth along WCR 86 between Briggsdale and New Raymer), but not a whole lot of other nifty stuff.
On to Crow Valley where the best sightings were….Steve Mlodinow and Nick Moore! Good to catch up, but there seemed to be more cub scouts than birds around. We did have a few birds up the creek to the north beyond the gate. There is a little pond out there at which there was lots of activity for us (and for Steve and Nick, too) including Green-tailed Towhee, White-throated Sparrow, Cedar Waxwing, Townsend’s Solitaire, etc.
John and I continued pushing east in order to make a lunch stop at the Pawnee Station Restaurant in New Raymer (really worth the visit if you are out that way). At that point John saw Kathy M.D.’s message relayed from David Dowell at Jumbo---Jaeger! We were less than an hour away, so we figured, what the hay. Called David up (we didn’t do stuff like this in the ‘90s) and he said he was still on the bird and would keep at it; so off we went.
We got to Jumbo less than an hour later and after a quick Marbled Godwit stop found David at the SE campground by the old boat ramp. “It just flew, but you can still see some sort of bird in my scope.” We decided to go back to the center point and try our luck there. Lo and behold we found TWO jaegers and after a lot of work pieced together an ID of 2 adult Parasitic Jaegers interacting and spending a lot of time together on the water and in the air. Both were light morphs and at one point they merged into one bird, in front and in back (i.e., exactly the same size). More capped than hooded, stub tailed, single underwing flash and lots of white shafts on the primaries on the upper wing. (See David’s pics on his Jumbo-Sedgwick eBird list if you want to look at them.)
We got bored eventually and started looking at the terns right in front of us 2-3 Black, 1 Forster’s and 4-5 Common, oh, and at least one, maybe 2 or more Sabine’s Gulls flying around. Then David brought us back to jaeger reality—there is a THIRD one out there! We all got on the bird which gave the impression of slightly larger; and then one of the first two drove it off (I think, we were suffering from TMJS—Too Many Jaegers Syndrome). We packed up and went back to the SE campground and never did make a definitive ID of the 3rd jaeger (probably another Parasitic), but we did have one fly in so close I thought it was going to try to make John throw up his lunch. Eventually it tracked down a Franklin’s and bullied that poor gull into giving up its lunch instead.
It’s days like this that make me wish I didn’t have a job (or 4 jobs as I seem to have right now). We lashed ourselves to the mast and headed home while the siren of the birds called us to stay.
Bill Kaempfer
Boulder
