Long Point gold - shorebirds and my rarest bird of the spring

To celebrate Ken's birthday I met him at his place at 4:30 this morning and we headed down for a morning of birding at Long Point. This time of year is great at Long Point with tons of species breeding locally all back on territory and a good number of migrants still coming through.

Our first stop was Hasting's Drive. We were greeted by lots typical late May migrants like flycatchers, thrushes and warblers like Tennessee, Wilson's and Blackpoll. We were walking along the road when we noticed a big flock (230 individuals) of Whimbrels heading west, then shortly after another flock (120). We're right in the prime time for Whimbrels moving through so we decided to head back to the car to do a proper lake watch with the scope. We were rewarded with a total of 865 Whimbrels plus 6 Red Knots (good Long Point bird) within the next hour and 7 Red-throated Loons. Here's our full checklist.

One of nine flocks of Whimbrels

After our success at Hasting's Drive we headed east towards Old Cut where on the way we heard a singing White-throated Sparrow - there's still a great mix of early and late migrants at Long Point making diversity really good. We made a quick walk through the LPBO Old Cut field station (full checklist here) and then walked through the New Provincial Park where activity was still good with lots of the expected migrants for the time of year. Here's our full checklist. We arrived back at Old Cut just in time for Avery (one of the banders at LPBO) to stick his head out of the lab and say "you're going to want to see this bird".

Sure enough it was a very interesting bird! My initial thought went to female Cerulean but the yellow on it made it obvious pretty quickly that wasn't correct. I'll let the photos speak for themselves:

The bird in question has a lot of features that point towards Magnolia Warbler, especially the back and rump, but there is lots wrong for that species - notably the pale head, throat and underparts and the tail (which should have white spots on the tail feathers rather than the white outer rectrices of this bird). Our best guess at the time was a Magnolia x Chestnut-sided Warbler hybrid but looking at the photos again I can see why Cerulean came to mind (check out that head/face) initially.

Magnolia x Chestnut-sided doesn't seem like too much of  stretch since the two species share a lot of breeding range and often are found in similar habitat. Cerulean x Magnolia would be more of a stretch since those two species don't overlap a whole lot or share very similar habitat. What do you think? According to Birds of North America online the only confirmed hybrid involving Magnolia Warbler was one with a Yellow-rumped Warbler from Dominican Republic (Latta, S. C., K. C. Parkes, and J. M. Wunderle. 1998. A new intrageneric Dendroica hybrid from Hispaniola. Auk 115(2):533-537.). That combination is extra interesting to me because I am convinced I observed such a bird just a week and a half ago...see my description of it here.

Anyways, we made a stop at Townsend Sewage Lagoons on the way home where there was a good number of shorebirds (see our full checklist here) including a beautiful female Wilson's Phalarope. We ended our day at about 140 species, not too shabby!

If you're thinking about visiting Long Point be sure to check out the new Long Point Birding Trail either online or by picking up your copy at Bird Studies Canada headquarters or the Old Cut field station.

Messed up Redheads

Erica and I headed south this weekend to visit our friend Mothboy in Ithaca. Ithaca is a very scenic place with forested hills, deep gorges, and waterfalls all around. It felt like we were transported into the future - much less snow and open water made it feel like spring!

Out around Ithaca we got to enjoy lots of "carolinian" species like Tufted Titmouse, Carolina Wren, and Red-bellied Woodpecker plus an Ithaca specialty Fish Crow. I was also successfully able to track down the ducks and gulls that have been missing from Ontario! Turns out Cayuga Lake is so deep that it doesn't freeze. They've had a great winter for gulls down there (explains where all those that I haven't been seeing have gotten to) - in the afternoon at the south end of the lake we had well over a thousand gulls on the little bit of ice there including Iceland, Glaucous and lots of Great Black-backeds (and Herring and Ring-billed of course).

Next to the gulls were hundreds of diving ducks- mostly Redheads but also a nice assortment that was eerily similar to what should normally be at Presqu'ile next weekend. But what was really cool to see here was a leucistic female Redhead - she was the same size and shape as the other Redheads and actively dove for food with the others but she was almost pure white. I sexed her as a female because the bill was greyish brown, rather than the blue of a male. But as it turned out that wasn't the only weird Redhead for the day...

We found this bird a bit further north along the east shore of the Lake at Meyer's Point. At first glance you might pass it off as a Canvasback (which we saw several of mixed in with Redheads earlier) but there were some things wrong: the back wasn't quite white enough, the eye was yellowish orange (vs red-orange), the forehead/bill slope wasn't straight enough, and the bill was not all dark. Those points all might suggest a Common Pochard (European relative) and that's probably what I would have thought.

However I knew that a couple of weeks ago Chris Wood and Jessie Barry had found and identified a male Canvasback x Redhead hybrid at the south end of the lake on February 15, so that made things simpler (and on closer inspection a few things didn't line up). According to eBird, presumably the same bird was then seen on February 24 at the north end of Seneca Lake by David Wheeler and Jim Tarroli. Also of interest, another Canvasback x Redhead hybrid was seen on 7 and 8 March in Jackson County, Michigan by Don and Robyn Henise - I wonder how many times two of these hybrids have been seen on the same day?

There was also a similar bird in Maryland in early January this year...maybe the same bird but who knows!

Anyways, here are a couple more photos: