Mew Gull, Shreveport 01/10/16

A little over a week ago, Charlie Lyon sent some pictures of a gull he had come upon on Cross Lake in Shreveport. The pictures appeared to be of a Mew Gull, a species that Louisiana birders have been trying to find for decades with no luck. Charlie appeared to have hit the jackpot. 

However, Charlie had only been able to go out once since then and hadn't been able to relocate the bird. 

Yesterday, Charlie and Dave Patton loaded up their boats with a handful of birders (Terry Davis, Rob Dobbs, Ronnie Maum, Mac Myers, Dan O'Malley, Larry Raymond, Phillip Wallace, and me) to try again to relocate it. I decided to go well north of my SWLA comfort zone for my first trip to Shreveport in years, but the early hour and the arctic chill (the Louisiana arctic, anyway) had me wondering why I had wanted to leave my warm bed. The temperature in Shreveport was in the low 30s and the north wind added to the chill, but we spent the day picking our way around the lake from gull flock to gull flock trying to find the Mew Gull among the swarms of Ring-billed and Bonaparte's gulls. The birds responded well to popcorn offerings but the responses were localized; only nearby birds would come in to the food, while birds even a few hundred yards away stayed put. We basically had to play connect-the-dots with gull flocks throughout the day. 

There were also about 20,000 Double-crested Cormorants on the lake, along with hundreds of Ruddy Ducks and Bufflehead, and a few Horned Grebes and Canvasbacks. We also got looks at a wary Western Grebe that Charlie had found at the end of December. But with the day winding down, we'd had no luck with the Mew Gull.

We split up, with one boat going towards a gull roost and the other checking a few more gull groups. At the roost, our boat party found a couple of large flocks on the lake. The birds were harder to scan on the water than in the air, so we offered them some popcorn and started looking for a gull with a darker rump and different tail and wing pattern than the Ring-billed Gulls. After a few minutes, Mac Myers spotted a good candidate and was able to confirm he had the bird and put us on it. Soon the other boat arrived, and the Mew Gull threw itself into the scrum for popcorn, giving us all great looks and photo opportunities. The others probably have better photos than I, but I was pretty happy to get great chances to photograph such a cooperative bird.

It was a great ending to a great day. It had started off bitterly cold on the water, but given the lucky turn of events at the end of the day, we were able to forget the chill. 

Many thanks and congratulations to Charlie on this first state record, and another big thank you to Dave for driving his truck and his boat all day. 

The color of the legs and feet was interesting. 

Fighting for position against a Ring-billed Gull. 

Compare the pale rump and distinct tail band of the young Ring-billed on the left with the  broadly dark tail and mottled rump of the Mew on its right. 

The fine-billed Mew among a group of bigger-billed Ring-billeds. 

Lapland Longspurs, Kaplan area, 3 Jan 2016

This afternoon, David Muth, Dan Purrington, and I went out to Sham's Road north of Kaplan to look for some Lapland Longspurs I had seen there on New Year's Day. The birds had been in a set of big muddy fields where stubble had been plowed under. When we got there today, the fields seemed empty except for some Killdeer, but after a few minutes we spotted a small group of sparrow sized birds circling the field in undulating flight. We picked them up in flight and saw they were the longspurs, and when they landed, we realized there were hundreds of the birds in the back of the fields. Soon the birds were up and flying, and some of the birds splintered off the main flock and landed near us. They moved like an army over the bare ground, foraging quickly and manically. One circled overhead, then landed right in front of us.

We ended up getting great looks, and though our highest count was about 250 birds, we're sure pretty sure not all of the birds were in the air at the same time. Usually these handsomely marked tundra nesters spend the winters on the prairies of the Midwest, reaching us in big numbers only when the weather there is too harsh or snowy for these birds to find food. Clearly, this has been a mild winter here--what brought so many down? 

Speck YTT, 12/26/2015

While scanning goose flocks on the day after Christmas, I came across two neck-banded geese, a Ross's with a blue collar with white letters or designs, and a Greater White-fronted Goose (a "Speck") with a red collar and white letters. The Ross's was short and feeding, so I got only a quick look at its neck before it lowered its head and got lost in the crowd. However, the speck was a lot more cooperative, and I could read a vertical Y with two horizontals Ts.

I entered the collar info in to the USGS BBL site and later received the certificate below. 

In other words, this goose seems to have made the following journey:

3600 miles/5800km. Pretty amazing stuff. We celebrate many rarities that travel far shorter distances to reach us, and sometimes fail to give our wintering geese the wonder they deserve for being such long distance marvels. A tip of the hat, YTT.