Day 365: December 31st – The Last Day

Mostly sunny, light breeze, low 30s

      Sounds ominous, doesn’t it.  Well today is the last day…the last day of the year 2012 in the Gregorian calendar.  It’s also the last day of the daily Natural Digital Blog.  Don’t despair, faithful readers.  The blog will continue to be published on a more irregular basis for the upcoming year.  Entries will be published periodically on a more or less weekly basis or as a special “bulletin” when some sighting of extreme noteworthiness occurs.  So, please continue to check in with natdigital.blogspot.com from time to time.

       On this final day, we made a stab at one last “year bird”, the Lapland longspur.  Spotted yesterday by a couple of more than reliable birders out in the black dirt farms of Pine Island, we just had to follow up and see if we could end the year with a bang.  Well, we missed the longspur, but we did find two great “snow birds” in the forms of the Horned lark and the Snow bunting. 

Horned lark

       The larks were found along Missionland Road in Pine Island and were present in large numbers.  They continually flew back and forth across the road, often landing right next to the snow banks deposited by the plows over the past three days.  With the ground under more than a half foot of snow, the larks were busy feeding on the seeds of the grasses which peeked above the blanket.  Occasionally, you’d see a lark reaching for the highest seeds since the lower crop had already been picked bare.

       There were a number of Snow buntings mixed in, but for the life of me, it seemed every time I had one in the viewfinder, along came another of my favorite birds, the Northern harrier.  The smaller birds would invariably take flight, and I ended up with either a blank field or a blurred bunting. 

       Eventually, we found a large flock of the larks with many more buntings sharing the fields along Rudinski off of Missionland.  While a bit distant, I did manage to get enough of an image to prove that we did in fact see them. 

       The longspur would have been nice, but we know he’ll be on site for a while to come as the snow cover is not going anywhere in the next week or two.  “Our destinations are our new beginnings”, so as we wind down this year, our new year-list begins tomorrow and who knows…perhaps the longspur will be one of the first birds to be added to that log.

       And so, we wish you all a most Happy and Healthy New Year for 2013 and thank you all for following our birding adventures this past year.  Montreal, Montana, Cape Ann, Cape May, Australia, New Zealand, the entire east coast, Florida, California, the Adirondacks and all other parts of New York and more.  It’s been a great birding year for us and we look forward to new birds and new adventures in 2013.  Hope to see you in the field!