Just before leaving on a business trip a flurry of posts came across the RI listserve about a Mountain Bluebird seen at Fort Getty in Jamestown – just a couple miles from where the Wood Sandpiper had been seen earlier in the fall. It had apparently been first discovered a couple weeks earlier, so I hoped that it would stick around till when I got back in town. Each day while I was gone there were posts that the bird was being seen reliably at the small Fort Getty park (there were no negative posts as all), so I was cautiously optimistic that it would still be around when I returned.
I headed to southern RI my first day back, arriving at Fort Getty early in the morning. A quick look around the park did not yield the bluebird, though I did find a late Blackpoll Warbler. I ran into another birder who had been there a while who also had not seen the bird, though she found the Blackpoll too. My optimism was waning – would I be the first birder to miss the bluebird?. I spent the next 45 minutes walking around the little park but with no luck. A flyover flock of siskins with at least one redpoll was a minor consolation. I started to wonder if the bluebird had relocated to one of the pastures near the entrance of Fort Getty Road. I mentioned my theory to the other birder, and she said she would check it out on her way out of the park. Sure enough, two minutes later, the other birder called me to report she found the bird in the eastern-most pasture on Fort Getty Road. Two minutes later I was at the field getting good scope views of the Mountain Bluebird.
A couple minutes later we saw the bird fly off to the west. So I went back to the campground (after a quick stop along Fort Getty Rd to see the Cattle Egret that had been feeding in the pasture) and instantly found the bluebird fly-catching from low posts at its more traditional location.
RI was my third New England state for this casual vagrant to the east. And of course I've seen it in most of the states in its normal range out west.
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