VISION Eagle Watch

One beautiful thing about doing Eagle trips is that you always come away with more than you bargained for. Sharon and I led a trip from Bear Mountain Bridge south to Croton Station for our local community group, "VISION". While the temps hovered in the teens and was actually 8 degrees at the time of departure, we still had 19 hearty souls join us and enjoy watching no fewer than 26 Bald eagles in flight, roosting, riding the ice flows on the Hudson, and perched in a couple of nests we pointed out. Along with these sightings, we had a close-up view of a fine Cooper's hawk and sightings of a number of different kinds of ducks including Redheads, Canvasbacks, Greater scaup, Common mergansers, Ruddy ducks, and more. We finished the day of with an inspiring flight of a Northern harrier over the grasslands at Croton Park. All-in-all, one fine day of birding with many fine folks!!!

Well, Christmas holidays got the best of me, so it's been a while since my last posting. I'll try to catch up here with reports on a few trips which have been very productive. At the end of the year, we took a day trip up to the Adirondacks in search of a reported Northern Hawk owl. A life bird for both Sharon and me, we figured it was worth the 500 mile round trip to bag it....a bag it we did! We had set our GPS to the street where it was last seen, and as we finally approached our destination, there was the owl. Every so often, chasing pays off. We also "chased" a Red-headed woodpecker located at Stonykill Farm just north of Beacon, NY. This bird was only a half hour away, so the effort was much less, but nonetheless productive. After spotting the woodpecker, we travelled south and scoped Storm King Mountain from the eastern shore of the Hudson. We found what we were looking for there as well....a pair of beautiful Golden eagles. One great thing about this time of year....it's easy to pile up the list of "year-birds". Last but certainly not least were our Horned larks which were found about an hour away in Pine Bush, NY. All of these birds were reported to us via the RBA on the Internet and all produced positive results. This is certainly a great age in which to be birding with the web and digital imaging at our disposal. We are preparing to head out to Florida in a week or two and we'll keep you posted as to how we make out on our birding adventures there. I promise to make an effort to me a bit more timely in our reports.