New England - May 2023 - Day 1 - Quebec to Maine

My flight to Montreal was totally uneventful and very boring, but it's not a long trip particularly. I never really even watch films on planes, so I just got the map up and read my field guide and the research materials I had printed off. I also listened to a few calls from the Audubon App. It was late by the time I picked up my car, a nice red Chevrolet Blazer, which in the UK would count as a large SUV but in America is merely small. I made it one piece about an hour or so east to the small town of Granby where my motel room key was waiting for me in their post box as arranged due to my late arrival. By staying up all the way (UK equivalent time of 3am or so) I would avoid jetlag which is always my first priority when arriving somewhere. 

I had a good sleep and at 6am local time the following morning I was at my first birding site, Lac Boivin, part of the Yamaska NP. It was great to be back birding in the US again, my first visit since the previous September, which now that I write that isn't actually that long ago. I was the only person there, and dosed up with insect repellent I headed off through the woods towards the lake shore. I was a little rusty for sure, but it wasn't long before I'd worked out Great Crested Flycatcher and Red-winged Blackbird again. Birds came thick and fast, with an excellent spell of ten minutes where a mixed group of Warblers bounced through some low trees by the water - Magnolia, Blackpoll, Yellow, Chestnut-sided, Tennessee, Common Yellowthroat and a bonus Baltimore Oriole. Out along a boardwalk section the boggy margins held Swamp Sparrow, and a Least Bittern was calling from an area I simply couldn't see into for ages before it finally showed itself on one edge. The lake itself was rather disappointing - only a handful of Canada Geese and Wood Duck, and a single Double-crested Cormorant, so I returned to the trees and walked a circular route back to the still-closed visitor centre. Veery, Hermit Thrush and Rose-breasted Grosbeak were all seen, and a noisy flock of Common Grackle were in a field over which Tree Swallow were flying. Yep, I was back in the saddle again. Nothing special so far, but the list was up and running.

My next stop was further east at another section of the Yamaska called "entre les deux digues", basically the next lake along. I walked west through a campsite to a dam. Red-eyed Vireos and American Redstart were everywhere, along with my first Least Flycatcher and Eastern Phoebe. As it was quite damp in this section of forest it was also good habitat for Northern Waterthrush, and I also found Black-and-White Warbler, several Ovenbird, and a Yellow-rumped Warbler. The dam had a couple of Killdeer on a small pool at the bottom, and a Great Northern Diver was bobbing about in front of it.

Back west at the Parc Daniel-Johnson Saturday morning was in full swing, lots of people out and about, but the highlight here were two Warbling Vireos and on the lake a Caspian Tern. I would have liked to have continued birding in Canada but I needed to get going, I had something like five hours of driving ahead of me and was only six miles away from where I had stayed the night. Let's get on the road, America is calling!

Welcome to Vermont! This is not what Bernie Sanders would want.

I crossed into Vermont at Stanstead just before after midday and made steady progress in a south-easterly direction along the 111 and 105 to Moose Bog. The target here was Black-backed Woodpecker but it turns out it was an early morning bird. Damn it! Visiting birders who had been there since first light showed me the trees it liked, where it had flown in from, where it had then gone etc, but despite sticking it out for an hour and a half there was no sign. The habitat did look excellent though, loads of dead trees in boggy habitat. Despite this first disappointment all was not lost. Both Kinglets were present as well as Blackburnian Warbler, and best of all a trio of rather tame Canada Jays came to visit me on the viewing platform at the end of a very short boardwalk, clearly expecting peanuts or something! Given how hard I had worked for these at Sax Zim in Minnesota in the depths of winter it felt like cheating! On the mammal front there was very appropriately a large Moose on the far side of the water and a couple of Otters were gliding around. And on the insect front.... well, the less said about the ravenous mosquitos the better. It was kind of tolerable at the water's edge but in the forest it was insane and if you stopped walking you were toast.

Blue Jay

Canada Jay

A Moose in Moose Bog, Vermont

I carried on to my final birding destination of the day, Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge in New Hampshire. I didn't reach it until after 5pm so not this was not ideal for birding, but I had always known that today would likely pan out like this. I power-marched into the forest, determined to get to some predetermined spot from my research. The paperwork I had is long gone so I cannot now remember what I was looking for but I didn't find it! It might have been Yellow-bellied Flycatcher now that I think about it, but I did get my first ever Alder Flycatcher on US soil, after a bird on Blakeney Point in Norfolk as long ago as 2010! An annoying and embarrassing gap filled! I picked it up on call as well, having learned it on the plane on the way over, most pleasing. Black-throated Green Warbler and Northern Parula were both new for the trip along this long track - 2.4 miles each way, the return leg in increasingly heavy rain as darkness fell. 

It was a further 3 hours and 130 miles onwards to my accomodation near Damariscotta in Maine, and it rained and rained for the whole journey with the final hour being incredibly treacherous. Given how shattered I was I took it really slowly, and I did also have a short power nap just after the halfway point. But nonetheless my next eBird list starts at 6.34am the next day - this is what I call a 'holiday'!

New England - May 2023 - Logistics and Itinerary

 Logistics

• A five day trip in the third week of May leaving after work on a Friday evening, returning overnight on the following Wednesday and going straight back to work. I used air miles to upgrade to a flat bed on the return - this is how I max out on holiday and avoid jetlag.
• Flights: British Airways from Heathrow to Montreal and booked with a car to turn it into a holiday and thus defer payment until a few weeks before departure. You also get a slightly better deal than when booking the two separately.
• Car: I had a very nice Chevrolet Blazer in bright red and with all mod cons. There are no issues taking Canadian cars over the border into the USA.
• Accomodation: first three days booked in advance via Booking.com, somewhere different each night. I mostly planned my itinerary in advance and crossed my fingers on the weather which mostly worked apart from my scheduled boat trip to a seabird colony off the Maine coast which was cancelled.
• My aims for the trip were threefold. 1) to add to my ABA list; 2) to increase my eBird and general coverage of US States and Canada; and 3) to enjoy some spring songbird migration.
• Literature/Resources: I used eBird for up-front planning and on-the fly birding (using the "explore" functionality in the App). For literature I used the Sibley East Coast field guide. I also used Merlin (a vocalisation ID tool) sparingly - I have some rules for this which I will expand upon later. As a supplement to visual birding it can work really well. The Audbon App was used when I wasn't carrying my book, and was useful for calls and songs.
• Food - well there is a lot of it in America. I tended to eat on the go, and try and have something more substantial in the evening. One night in New Hampshire there was nothing open but I survived on fat reserves...
• Insects - Jesus H Christ! The boggy woodlands of New England are a mosquito paradise. Even worse they are a deer tick and Lyme Disease epicentre. I was amazingly careful but I only just got away with it. Beware!

I actually drove 2509km with various little detours.

Itinerary

• Day 0 - Evening flight departed London just after 6pm, landing in Montreal at 8pm local time. I drove about an hour east and stayed in a bare bones motel that was close to some birding spots for the following morning.
• Day 1 - The morning spent birding in Quebec around Lac-Boivin and Yamaska NP before crossing the US border into Vermont and heading to Moose Bog about an hour south-east where I dipped Black-backed Woodpecker. Late afternoon at Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge in New Hampshire, another site chosen in advance for species diversity. Overnight in coastal Maine north-east of Portland, a further three hours drive. Quite a long day.
• Day 2 - Planned day trip to the migrant hotspot of Monhagen Island cancelled due to rough seas so instead birded around Pemaquid and Boothbay all morning before driving south (as per original plan) to Biddeford. Dusk at Kennebunk Plains for Eastern Whip-poor-will. Overnight on NH / Massachusetts border.
• Day 3 - All morning on the migrant hotspot of Plum Island in MA, part of the Parker River NWR, before driving down to Revere beach in Boston for some bizarrely regular Manx Shearwater. Somewhat stubbornly continued down to Rhode Island for a State tick and birded coastal areas before an early evening walk in some woods just over the border in Connecticut for another new State. Then drove all the way back to NH to be in position for the replacement ME boat trip the following afternoon. A crazy day but very satisfying.
• Day 4 - Early start at a site in NH for Upland Sandpiper before birding back up the coast to New Harbor in ME for the rescheduled 'Puffin Cruise' boat trip which was a massive disappointment. Birded in ME for the rest of the day before a long drive west via Augusta and into NH to be in position at Moose Bog.
• Day 5 - Various NH sites at first light as I made my way to Moose Bog in VT for another attempt at the B-b Woodpecker, this time successfully. Then birded slowly west through VT with the afternoon spent around Missisquoi NWR before crossing back into Quebec for a late evening flight back to London.

Unexpected and very very close Canada Jay in Vermont

A cold morning

I am always conflicted with cold weather. One the one hand local birding can get more interesting, as was the case with the Whooper Swans. On the other my precious plants start to suffer, and in some cases, keel over and die. I am currently agonising over a now 14 foot tropical pine tree that in previous winters has just about scraped under the conservatory roof but this year is simply too tall. Online literature suggests it dies much below 3 degrees centigrade..... I could cut off the top 3 feet perhaps, but the symmetry of this and many other Araucaria is a large part of their beauty and once so lopped never returns. I am more inclined to see if it can somehow survive the occasional frost. This week was the first test, it got down to about -1c for a few hours... If it doesn't (and knowing this sad day would one day likely come) I bought a replacement tree of the same species about two years ago. Like its big brother it lives outside for most of the year, but it small enough that I can easily bring it in. This one has already doubled in height in the two years that I've had it and is now about 7 feet tall. I brought it in in about mid-October, neither too early nor too late. The chief issue here is that it might get too hot and too dry on sunny days. They're fickle things.

Chief tree in waiting

I was out on Wanstead Flats early on Sunday as well. It was if anything colder than Saturday, and I had high hopes of further cold weather action. These went unfulfilled but it was one of those great crisp days with clear skies. I suspect that the strong northerlies displaced the Swans on Friday, and Saturday was all about them getting their bearings. Other London sites also cashed in, including both Regent's Park and Hampstead Heath who both picked up Whoopers before we did, simultaneously observing nine birds, two adults and seven juveniles, which two hours later had presumably split up into a group of five or six on the river, five of which meandered our way briefly, with the other three unaccounted for. None were seen on Sunday that I'm aware of so they have probably resettled somewhere more suitable and have hopefully all found each other again. But even though it was colder on Sunday, it wasn't so cold that it would have provoked an exodus of Ducks and Waders from outside of London to head in to our relative warmth, that really only happens with extreme events. The kind of events that will definitely kill my tree...

I should moan more often than I do, Ahem.

Well well. My last post essentially had me moaning about how the patch has been less than spectacular of late and how I was thinking about birding elsewhere. This morning - on the patch, like the decisive person I am - Tony and I were having much the same conversation. His fiftieth visit this year apparently, he'd seen very little and found nothing. What was the point, it's rubbish, next year he too was going to do something different as well, oh look clear skies again. Etc.

It was true, a promising morning had delivered nothing. We had walked about four miles and the best bird had been a Stonechat. So much for the slightly colder weather, but at least it wasn't raining and it did feel a bit more like November. We went to get breakfast from Gregg's, usually the highlight of any morning round here and took it back to the VizMig Point? Where shall we stand to see nothing? How about here, it's as crap as anywhere else. Right. 

Restored, we had one last wander down Centre Path where we met Mary and continued moaning. Then a message popped up on Tony's phone from some kind of London Rare Bird Whatsapp group that I'm not part of. Whooper Swans flying north west over Woolwich. I casually looked at the map.... Hmmm, that's interesting. Depending on where in Woolwich that would potentially have them flying somewhere towards Canary Wharf and perhaps over Stratford. Could they follow the Lea Valley? How high might they be? High enough or not? We can only see the top third of the tower, I thought about dashing home to my balcony but it was too far. We started scanning towards the south west.

Birds have a funny habit of not always flying in straight lines and it was with this in mind I also scanned to the east from time to time. Remarkably on one of these scans I picked up five Swans over Alex, quite high and flying with some purpose in a north-north westerly direction. Too far to conclusively identify through binoculars but surely two plus two equals four in situations like this? Or rather five. Where was my damn camera?! Oh, at home gathering dust as usual. Excellent. Quick, Tony, take photos I implored! It doesn't matter how far they are, get something and maybe we'll be able to eliminate Mute Swan on head shape! This he proceeded to do until the Swans had disappeared over the horizon, seemingly continuing on their NNW heading.

The back of the camera images magnified through inverted binoculars looked decent, nice long triangular heads and long slender necks, but I remained worried that once seen on a computer I'd need to post an embarrassing retraction on the London news group. Even more so when some time later five Whooper Swans were reported at Rainham, i.e. in the opposite direction.... Oh dear. I nearly threw Tony off the patch! Go home! What are you waiting for?!

Whooper Swan over Wanstead, courtesy of Tony Brown.

Thankfully once home (painfully slowly I might add!) Tony's photos confirm our initial confidence. These are actually the first Whooper Swans for the patch that we know about. There are a handful of records of Bewick's Swan, two from the dawn of time and then a sighting from Nick about six years ago during cold weather, but no Whooper. We seem to have pulled off an amazing coup despite all our pessimism! We were expecting the next sighting to be in the Lea Valley somewhere, perhaps KGV, but presumably the birds flew in a gigantic circle and ended up back on the Thames at Rainham where they were seen about 45 minutes later. This takes my all-time patch total to 167, and this year to a slightly-above-average-for-November 112. Can't wait to get back out tomorrow!

Closer to home

A short interlude while I gather my thoughts for the next installment of my travel adventures - this will be a summary of a short trip to New England in May. Lots of birds, lots of ticks, and also lots of Ticks, quite a few of them burrowing into me. Yuck, but I didn't catch anything nasty thankfully. I think if you find them and pull them off within a day you will generally get away with it.

But for now I'll give readers a break and return to all the birds I've seen in Wanstead. 

...

Right, so that's that then. I jest, it hasn't been that bad. Well, maybe it has but I've still enjoyed myself. As you can see from my annual patch list I've not added to my total since the Woodcock over a month ago, but I have been out quite a lot, mostly in the hour of daylight currently available before I have to go to work. There was the Woodpigeon extravaganza in early November but there has otherwise been little to put in the diary so to speak. Fieldfare and Redwing seem to have passed over. The latter I now seem to see only rarely on the patch but Fieldfare is a daily occurence at the moment with small groups flying between the copses. My guess is that these should now be classified as local birds and that they'll be here for the duration. Woodcock is being seen regularly in specific places, so perhaps my bird towards the end of October decided to stay? Regardless it is clear that we have at least one resident bird now and that it will be here all winter. There seems to have been a small build-up of Redpoll, quite faithful to the SSSI birches, but I think we are all waiting for a cold snap. Just one person has recorded Snipe (which I still need for the year) but other than this there has been no real change in the birds we are seeing. On the mornings I go out I am just seeing the same birds over and over, and whilst I appreciate the fresh air and getting a few steps in I do require a bit of variety. This perhaps explains why I've run away to Kent, Essex and Norfolk recently. If we saw a bit of change then I'd likely stay here.

In other news here is what's left of our Skylark fence from a few weeks ago. It is increasingly vandalised, a complete eye sore, and for this I actually think a fair portion of blame should fall on the Corporation of London. The signs (genally also vandalised, snapped in two mostly) say that it is for the summer period, and by not immediately taking it down and making the area available to the public once the Skylark breeding season is over they will just alienate the people they really need to get on side. Leaving it in place for months afterwards is very poor decision making and one is tempted to say that they reap what they sow. Of course a large part of the blame also lies with the ignorant and highly twattish dog owner with a pair of shears who has systematically walked around the perimiter slashing it to bits under the cover of darkness in an act of juvenile spite, but I think you get my drift. The shredded plastic was finally removed by the Corporation about three days ago.

Iceland - May 2023 - Day 3 - Sandgeroi and home

A lovely spring morning in Iceland. May 15th!

We awoke to a blizzard. Perfect, just perfect. With no reason to stay up here, and with a flight late morning, we put Hestaland behind us and headed south to Keflavik. There was just time to dip the Black-winged Stilt again and then scrape in some final birding at Sandgeroi to the west of the airport. This was actually quite successful, and had we had more time we would have likely come back - there is a fish processing plant here and as such the place is very birdy. Hundreds of Iceland Gulls, loads of Waders on the beach, a final Wheatear and rather unexpectedly a few Manx Shearwater out on the horizon. It had been a challenging trip but very enjoyable nonetheless. There is a list of species below, and further detail about exact sites can be found at this eBird link. So that's Iceland done, finally. Next up is New England a mere four days later. I am unstoppable.

Iceland - May 2023 - Day 2 - Snaefellsnes

We woke up to a Black-tailed Godwit on the lawn and an Arctic Skua flying past the kitchen window. Just your regular Icelandic garden birds. Our plan today was to drive some of our favourite roads to the north-west of Borgarnes, some long circular routes that leave the main road west-bound and then loop back to rejoin it further up. On previous trips these had been extremely productive, offering fabulous encounters with Skuas and Waders, some of my best photos of Icelandic birds come from this area. They were not improved upon....

A familiar shape. We did not get attacked this time.

The weather, oh the weather. It is just luck. You could go for a three week trip and not see the sun. Equally you could go for a weekend and enjoy wall to wall sunshine and blue skies. Luck of the draw. We lost. Another dreadful and dreary day. It was clear, at least initially, but when the light is dull so are the photographs - as you will see! All the birds we expected were there but there were no pleasing poses, no close fly-bys, no lovely posts and, well, no light. Mick and I are very exacting, he far more so than me. I pressed the trigger a few times but it was just miserable. And then the rain started. Excellent. 

We established however that there was not expected to be much rain on the Snaefellsnes Penisula, which is the large bit that sticks out westward about half way up. We decided to cut our losses and head up there as it was only about 90 minutes away. This turned out to be an excellent decision and as we approached we could even see blue sky. We spent the late morning and early afternoon birding our way westward until we reached the coastal bird colonies around Arnarstapi - Kittiwakes primarily, but also Fulmar and a few Auks. We probably spent more time visiting various landmarks along the coast, famous churches, and whilst neither of us are in any way accomplished landscape photographers we gave it a go.

Experimenting with HDR 

The Black Church of Budir

Half church, half shed

The landscapes in Iceland are immense and dramatic

After having really quite a nice time photographing birds in nice light we crossed the peninsula to the northern side and birded our way back east. There were Harlequins at Grundarfjordur, and lots of Glaucous Gulls, and we found our first White-tailed Eagle at Berserkjahraun. In a plantation to the south of Stykkisholmur we located Goldcrest and Redpoll in amongst loads of invisible Redwing, and from the hill that overlooks the harbour we found a distant Puffin bobbing about. It was all about the trip list at this point.

Fulmar

And that was our day, we had at least outrun the weather and finally had some OK bird photographs. It was a long drive back to our digs at Borgarnes but we made good time and had another filling meal at the N1.