Hi all, Yesterday morning when I stepped out of my house to get into my car, first thing I heard was raven calling. Initially I thought it was my cell phone reminding me that I am loosing internet connection. But it persisted and then came closer and closer. Then it flew over the yard to my neighbor's yard and back to my yard and stayed in the vicinity. I believe it was defending a road kill near my house.
Then I headed to Finger Lakes National Forest hoping to record in the morning and later look at odes and butterflies. It was a quiet windless morning, but darned planes as soon as there was something interesting singing a plane would fly by. But yet I managed to snatch a few quiet moments and had nice song bursts of several Wood Thrushes, Robins dueting or rather dueling, lots and lots of Juncos, Hooded Warblers, and a warbler of yet unidentified species. Then there were flocks of juveniles being fed by the parents etc. Also there were a couple of Broad-winged Hawks 'teepee'ing. By then it was warm enough to switch to arthropod mode. I did get some interesting behaviors of damselflies. Very few butterflies I came across. Unfortunately, whatever pond I wanted to stop there was a tent/s set up just next to those locations and I felt odd to stop by when the occupants were sleeping. When I was at Foster Pond, by then I had left my recording gear in the car and was with my cameras, I heard a WHITE-EYED VIREO doing part of the song (listen to Randy's recording 11680 in MLNS). I was cursing myself for not bringing my Sony PCM 10 alone without a mic. Then I thought I can record it on my video camera. So I started the video camera, but the Vireo knew I was planning to record so it shut up! By that time at Potomac group campground I saw lots of cars parked, so I asked one of the occupants as to what they were doing there. I was told that there were about 90 people crawling in the woods as a part of Orienteering challenge. I saw license plates from as far as Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky etc. It is similar to birders big day. There were several marked locations, so they have to bag as many as possible in 24 hours! So I wished them good luck and continued on my out as I did not want to run into these folks. Later in the evening we had a riotous moth event evening in the Robert Treman State Park where many of you showed up and enjoyed the evening. Overall, we might have had almost 100 species, whith species like Hermit Sphinx and there was a wave of Waved Sphinx. I personally have photographed 84 species and many of them were new to me and I still need to identify some of them. It was fun evening. By the time I got home it was almost 1.20 AM. At home I had moth lights on. So spent some more time looking at them but not many, but I did have a couple of new species. I will put these moth pictures to a website and send a link later. I got up again at 5.08 am to make sure those poor moths wont become victims of my datbirds and cardinals. When I went out it was deafening with the sounds of birds. I recorded for a few minutes, but even at that time traffic seemed to be quite heavy. Then I decided to go to bed again. while I was in the bed I heard my neighbor's mimic singing away in glory, he had few snatches of Catbird and cardinals too. But naturally signing bird were my Robin, whom I think is a boring singer he only does variation on "Steven, Steven stick" and his neighbors, catbirds, chickadees, Tufted-titmouse, Blue Jays, Raven, American Crows, Phoebe, Flicker, Red-bellied Wood pecker, Downy, House wren. I drifted back to sleep and at 7.08 am when I was awake, I heard a BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO doing " CooCooCook" for at least 10 minutes and also a Tree Swallow chattering away as it flew over my yard. That was a blast! Cheers Meena Meena Haribal Ithaca NY 14850 42.429007,-76.47111 http://www.haribal.org/ http://meenaharibal.blogspot.com/ Ithaca area moths: https://plus.google.com/118047473426099383469/posts Dragonfly book sample pages: http://www.haribal.org/dragonflies/samplebook.pdf -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
