When Angus posted his query about this species I was immediately reminded of two recent conversations with Tom Burke and Doug Futuyma. Despite living more than an hour apart in the quite different realms of Westchester and Suffolk Counties, Tom and Gale probably share the most similar birding mode to Pat's and mine of all our friends: we cover a large area in southeastern NYS, our coverage is much more thorough than that of our more list-motivated friends, and yet we follow up reports of unusual birds (chase) much more than our most purist, patch-working friends. And given that we've been doing it this way for decades, we've developed very similar--and probably relatively accurate--perceptions of the status of bird species around here.
My conversation with Tom occurred back in August when an American Golden-Plover occurred in some (to me) remote and inconvenient part of southeastern NYS; I laughed and said, "I think I'll wait for another one!" Tom understood completely but he made the point out loud that the species has been rather difficult to find over the past couple of years, and I had to concur. The conversation with Doug occurred just a few days ago, when he arrived a little later than I to a seawatch. I had just had an AMGP fly past, calling, just my third of the entire fall, and I knew Doug hadn't connected with one yet. It really is possible for active, capable birders to miss this species nowadays. So when I saw Willie's post, it really gave me pause. Given how infrequently I cover western NYS in late summer and fall, I've run into AMGP there often enough that I assumed they were even more regular there than here on LI. For instance, when Pat and I chased the Swallow-tailed Kites in Hamlin back in September, I sort of assumed that picking up our year-bird AMGP would require little more than pulling off the road somewhere nearby, on Andy Guthrie's instructions. But Andy couldn't offer an easy target, at least on that day. Willie's post makes the point again about different modes of occurrence (agricultural fields vs. lakeshore roosts), and this distinction is very valid in my own Long Island/coastal Rhode Island area. Historically there was a series of traditional stopover sites for flocks of this species in a very specific physiographic belt, ranging from Ridge in central Suffolk County, through Riverhead and the North Fork of Long Island, to similar sites in Charlestown, Richmond, and South Kingstown, Rhode Island. I'm not a geologist, but this belt of flat farmland lies along the Charlestown Moraine and was historically much used for potato farming. Nowadays it has been given over mostly to turf farming, where it hasn't been destroyed altogether. (There was also a very similar satellite site, set off somewhat from this belt, on the South Fork of LI, between Water Mill and East Hampton.) In these places, one could often see long-staying flocks of AMGP and other shorebirds. But for those of us who tire easily of scanning turf fields, there was another mode of occurrence, in which this species could be encountered fairly regularly along the outer coast. My perception is that the turf field context has failed almost completely in the past several years. Not only are the flocks of AMGP absent, but my perception is that they are utterly birdless now--lacking even the flocks of Mourning Doves, Killdeer, Tree Swallows, and Starlings that used to be routine. The coastal mode still works, but it seems like it's always single birds now, never flocks of six or seven as we sometimes saw in the past. My own fall records show a paucity of AMGP in my area 2017-2020. They also reveal other periods of low detection rates, but I suspect those might be at least partly misleading. As Angus noted, I can imagine that in the past, when I didn't perceive the species as rare and lucked into it early along the coast, I might have spared myself dedicated scanning of the turf! https://flic.kr/p/2jW26Qu I fear that this species is yet another once common one that we will come to miss in the future. Shai Mitra Bay Shore ________________________________________ From: bounce-125041945-3714...@list.cornell.edu [bounce-125041945-3714...@list.cornell.edu] on behalf of Willie D'Anna [dannapot...@roadrunner.com] Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2020 12:14 PM To: '& [NYSBIRDS]' Subject: RE:[nysbirds-l] American Golden-Plover - another NYS migrant to worry about? Like Angus, I also have noticed fewer reports and smaller numbers of American Golden-Plover in Western New York. I live on Lake Ontario in Niagara County where most autumns I could see this species without any special effort. That is, I'm not one to hunt down a species for my year list, unless I am doing a big year, but I still would find them. A few years ago, I noticed that newer birders were chasing after reports of this species for their year list and I assumed that they simply did not understand their habitat preferences or else they could find their own. However, two years ago, I did a big year in Niagara County and I had to actively search for Golden-Plover on two dozen occasions before I finally found a single bird. Two weeks later, I had two birds for a grand total of three in the county for the year, a year in which I was exceptionally active. Of course, my difficulty might simply be attributed to Golden-Plovers having a poor breeding season but I never had any adults and I was active through the summer when they would have passed through. The Buffalo Ornithological Society (BOS) maintains a database of noteworthy bird sightings in the BOS Region, which includes all of Kingbird Region One plus the Niagara peninsula of Ontario. I don't have the skills to generate a graph of high yearly counts from this database but from looking it over, it seems that high yearly counts have decreased considerably. For example, there are fewer triple-digit counts in the Niagara peninsula of Ontario which is the best area in the region to find this species. Western NY would occasionally get triple-digit counts as well but there have been none since 1997. And even double-digit counts are fewer than before 2000. This year, I managed to see one Golden-Plover in Niagara County, a bird found by someone else, and it was on a pier on Lake Ontario, not in a field. I spent considerable time looking in fields for this species this fall but found none. Willie D'Anna Wilson, NY Subject: American Golden-Plover - another NYS migrant to worry about? From: Angus Wilson <oceanwander...@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:18:10 -0400 X-Message-Number: 6 I am glad to see an informed discussion about the apparent decline in Bonaparte's Gulls both in western and coastal New York State. Birding forms tend to focus on the positive such as new sightings, influxes, and weather-related events, with much less attention given to species that might be disappearing before our eyes. The human brain is not very good at accessing the absence of something and birding record systems are seemingly not much better either. Aside from Bonaparte's Gull, I have wondered about the status of America Golden-Plover in the state. In the past several years I've noted few if any reports of larger flocks that would draw birders to sod fields and other grassy habitats in the fall, especially in eastern Long Island. In recent years only a scattering of Golden-Plovers have been reported in the fall (principally from late August to late October), rarely more than two together. Many people may have successfully ticked their 'year bird' and not given much more thought to it but the reality is that we probably are all ticking the SAME few birds. Looking at the tallies for some of the hotspots for southbound plovers it was not long ago that flocks of 60-100+ were frequent in and around Riverhead (Suffolk NY). 2016 seems to have been the last good season (many reports of 60+), with 2012 and 2013 similarly featuring some larger flocks (counts of 102, 105, etc). Is something going on? Is the apparent decline in birds staging on eastern Long Island echoed elsewhere? American Golden-Plover is an arctic and subarctic tundra nesting species that makes a long oceanic flight (a minimum of 2,400 miles nonstop) to wintering grounds in the Pampas and Campos regions of southern South America. It is possible that weather conditions have allowed birds to launch from further north and simply bypass our area. Scrutiny of trends in the Canadian Maritime Provinces and New England or the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio flyway (if the southbound route has shifted towards the center of the continent) might shed light on this. Changes in pesticide use might also render the Long Island sod fields less attractive such that birds arriving at night leave soon after. It's worth noting that aside from a possible shift in the migration route, many high latitude breeding species undergo cycles of abundance that reflect cycles in breeding success - these may relate to lemming cycles, late snowmelt, and so on. It could be we are in the trough of one of these cycles. Careful monitoring of the relative numbers of juveniles/1st basic and adults (estimating the ratio from year to year) can give warnings of these changes. This could also be done fairly easily with Bonaparte's Gulls because these two age classes are easy to distinguish. Unfortunately, relatively few birders keep notes on these things and again there's no simple way that I can find to recover such information from eBird or other record collections. Maybe folks on this list will have insight into how best to use the available data in this regard. All food for thought. Don't get me started on Upland Sandpiper...... -- Angus Wilson New York City -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ -- -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
