Common Loon, Red-necked Grebe, and Woodcock in West Virginia, April 2014

With another business trip to Pittsburgh I was able to take an afternoon off to head down into northern WV to work on my local statelist.  I had finally gotten my WV list over the old ABA reportable threshold with my last trip.  But I was just 8 over threshold, so I needed 7 more to get to my somewhat arbitrary goal of 15 over reportable.  I contacted local birder Terry Bronson and we came up with a plan to hit some local hotspots to search for my targets.

The first stop was Cheat Lake to try for waterfowl.  The first couple stops were pretty slow, picking up just a few dabblers and divers.  But on the next stop we simultaneously noticed a distant large diver – a Common Loon – statebird #187.  Common Loon is certainly not a rare species most anywhere in the northeast, but it’s not an easy bird for WV with the limited number of deep lakes in the state.  And WV fills a big gap in my statebird map below.

A couple stops later we were at a different part of Cheat Lake especially in search of wintering Red-necked Grebes.  Although this is typically a quite rare species in WV, there had been significant numbers in WV this winter presumably because their normal wintering area in the Great Lakes was frozen.  So this was a key target of mine that day, even though April was getting quite late for this species.  Soon after we arrived at the spot we noticed a bird dive just a short distance offshore.  And a minute later it popped up – it was a Red-necked Grebe.  We later saw a second bird at this same spot, and another at a different location.  I was able to get a couple distant phone-scoped photos of the first bird, which was starting to come into breeding plumage.

As shown in my statebird map below, I have seen Red-necked Grebe in many of its normal wintering areas on the coasts and on the Great Lakes, plus several western and Midwestern states where it is a breeder.

 

As the afternoon progressed we made several other stops looking for some less likely statebirds with no luck.  Eventually that left me with one more realistic statebird possibility at the end of the day – American Woodcock.  Terry took me to Little Indian Creek WMA where he had had numerous Woodcocks in the past.  As I was killing time waiting for dusk, I noticed two very distant birds flying north.  They were loons migrating north, but they seemed to have deep wingbeats.  I wish I had brought my scope as they were just too far away to ID for sure with binocs, but they could have been Red-throateds.  Oh well.  Finally, as dusk approached, I had two Woodcocks calling just as Terry had predicted.  That fills in a big gap in my statebird map below, though I still need this species in several of its normal eastern breeding area.

Woodcock was my third statebird of the day, giving me 189 in WV and 11 over reportable.  Just 4 more to go to reach my goal.