Upon entering the Stevenson compost compound to census crows today, I was
greeted by the juvenile THAYER'S GULL and an adult LESSER-BLACK BACKED
GULL. (Smooth, clean, chocolaty dark chest, all dark bill, intermediately
sloped forehead, frosty white under the wingtips, and not-quite-dark-enough
upper wingtips made it jump out of the background of young Herring
Gulls. By "jump" I mean, like, flinch when you cast your eyes over a crowd
when you have a frown on your face; if it wasn't your spouse or child, you
never would have noticed.) Unfortunately I was quickly distracted and
never saw either again in the next 2 hours. I should say that last weekend
I saw 2 adult Lesser Black-backed Gulls at the compost; one that appears to
have been there for several weeks that has nearly no white spotting on the
wingtips, and another with large white spots who had a huge molt gap with
p8 and p7 (?) not visible. I don't know which was there today, if it was
either of those two. My distraction cleared the piles, but soon some crows
and gulls came back.
After a while of watching crows, a pale first cycle ICELAND GULL showed up
on the piles. Eventually I realized that 2 pale first cycle Iceland Gulls
were present. I never saw them together, but I found it unusually easy to
refind the "one" Iceland Gull, and then when I was taking a photograph of
one the image showed up on the screen and it had in addition to the main
subject the pure white wingtip of a 2nd Iceland.
Too many hawks and too many people eventually led to the complete desertion
of the compost, with the crows hiding uphill for more than a half hour and
the gulls circling higher and higher until they drifted out of sight. I
thought that they appeared to head off SE, but an hour or so later from Mt.
Pleasant I still saw a large group of circling gulls over Ithaca.
Mt. Pleasant had little to offer but quiet and solitude. I did see one
local Rough-legged Hawk and a few Red-tailed Hawks and Turkey
Vultures. Most interesting was a kettle of circling COMMON RAVENS far off
to the east. I found them through binoculars as large circling birds and
expected to find them to be vultures or hawks when I got the scope on them.
But, no, they were six ravens! I've seen very large congregations of
ravens in the West, and I've run into juvenile bands of up to 35 in New
York, but this was my first experience with what appeared to be a
"migrating" group, using thermals to gain altitude and head south. I have
no idea who they were or what they were doing, but if it was early
September instead of November you couldn't have told them from a group of
Broad-tailed Hawks by behavior alone.
The only other birds of note today were single males of Common Goldeneye
and Bufflehead on Dryden Lake, along with some Common and Hooded
mergansers. Oddly, these ducks were seeking refuge from the hunters at the
south end of they lake by hugging the shore on the north end, amongst the
goose and duck decoys tethered there.
Kevin
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