Say's Phoebe - Delta South WMA, Union County
The phoebe was sitting quietly on a tree branch nest to the big white shed that is conspicuously located to the right of the Delta farmstead's entrance. It's silhouette looked unusual to me and I took a quick series of photographs from afar. I have never posted publicly to eBird, but the good folks on the ABA's What's this Bird? Facebook page confirmed my find and encouraged me to list it here.
And the clincher was a nice closeup photo of a Say’s Phoebe included in the checklist! Sounds like the observer was a beginning birder, and hat’s off to him for finding and reporting such a nice rarity.
I wasn’t familiar with the site, or even the county for that matter, so I quickly went to GoogleMaps and was happy to find that the site was just a 90-minute ride away. Now it just needed to stick around. Luckily the bird was reported again on both the 15th and 16th, so the chase was on. I contacted my birding buddy Bill Hooker and he was interested in going after itas well. It turns out Say’s Phoebe would be a SC state bird for him as well, so he and his wife Anita agreed to meet me at the site the next morning. Now I needed the bird to cooperate better than a Say’s Phoebe I chased in NC a few years back. Although that bird was long-staying, I made 3 trips for it and missed it despite 5 hours of searching.
Sightings of the SC Say’s Phoebe mentioned that the bird was seen foraging from low perches in a recently burned field just below a big white shed. Bill, Anita, and I arrived at the Delta South WMA early on the 17th and it only took us a few seconds to locate the bird’s prime foraging area. But a quick scan from the road didn’t reveal the bird. Our view of the burned field was a bit obscured by cedars along the road, so we repositioned ourselves, but still to no avail. Flashbacks of my failed searches for the NC bird went through my head.
We decided we needed to get better views of the field, so we found a break in the fence and started to walk into the field. Here’s shot of that recently burned field that our target bird preferred.
Within a few seconds we all spotted a perched Phoebe – but with a closer look it turned out to be an Eastern Phoebe. A bit later we found yet another Eastern Phoebe. Maybe we were in the right area. Then just a couple minutes later Bill said that he had a possible candidate perched in the distance. I put the bird in my scope and it was indeed our target Say’s Phoebe. For the next couple minutes we watched it perched both near the ground, and higher on exposed perches. I was able to get this less-than-satisfying silhouetted phonescoped shot of the bird.
Soon thereafter the bird flew across the road and out of view. Not the best views for us, but good enough for the ID. And certainly much better than my experience with that NC bird.
Say’s Phoebe was #304 for me in SC. My statebird map for this species is inserted below. I’ve seen it throughout the blue-shaded central and western states where it is regular. And now SC is the 5th brown-shaded state where I’ve seen it as a rarity.
