I'm sitting at my desk and my cell rings - it's from Len Medlock who is out birding in NH virtually every day. An Avocet has been found on the NH coast! Within 2 minutes I'm out the door for the quick 45-minute ride to Meadow Pond (making calls to alert a couple other birders along the way). When I get there, Len and Steve Mirick are on the Avocet just a short distance away. And the pond is alive with birds - peeps, yellowlegs, short-billed dowitchers, stilt sands, semi plovers, great and snowy egrets, shovelers, teal, and several Forster's Terns. During my short visit both a Merlin and a Peregrine also pass though the peeps. Although I could only stay a few minutes, it was an amazing quick stop not only with a new statebird (the Avocet), but also good NH birds like shoveler and Forster's terns. And this is a new spot that I've never birded.
My statebird map for American Avocet is below (shaded states are those where I've seen this species). NH is my 4th New England state for Avocet, not only indicative of how often it strays from it's normal range, but also that it can generally be chaseable when a vagrant.
No comments:
Post a Comment