10/5/2019
I've been on repeat for a while. On the days I've had to bird, I've pretty much been going to one location over-and-over. I've had a lot of luck at Eagle Creek Park over the past few years. Fall migration there at the marina has been great. The migrants tend to congregate in the area, and the dogwood berries bring a number of them down to eye-level. Things have been different this year. It's hard to say what the cause may be (poor timing by me, bad year, or the cleanup efforts there), but the birds just are not there like they used to be.
This weekend, I wend to the park Friday morning to bird for a couple hours before starting work for the day. It was the same experience. There was a group of us standing there and talking about birds. I was determined to break out of my pattern of the past few weeks and took Scott Evans, a good birder and photographer from Monroe Co., up on his offer to do some birding with him. It is a bit late in migration, but I headed down to meet up with him and bird a couple locations around Monroe Reservoir.
We had great light and a lot of activity in several places. It was good to finally see a good number of birds. Photographs were few, but I was really happy how a few of them turned out. My favorite of the day was a beautiful Blue-headed Vireo that popped up for a couple seconds before disappearing.
I'm sure I'll head to ECP a few more times this fall. The Cape May have not even shown up there, yet. So, I feel there is still some opportunity there. We've hit the time of year to start focusing on finding migrant sparrows, though, and I will be focusing on them throughout the rest of this month.
Thanks, again, to Scott for getting me out of my rut.
Thanks for reading,
Mike
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