Chuck-will’s-widow twitch

 Rarely does something fall right into your lap… but it’s nice when it does! Scrolling the rare bird alert digest yesterday and saw there was a sighting of chuck-will’s-widow (henceforth CWWI) almost exactly across the river from work. I hemmed and hawed a little over running over, but when I saw the last confirmed sighting was 5 minutes ago, I had to go for it. Blake was on board as well as we’d already blocked the time out for the gym.

After a stressful power walk - will it be there? will this rain that’s starting up perturb it? - we came across a serene looking man with Jimmy Buffet vibes on the other side of the river. He just looked at us and said “did you see it?” Presumptuous but correct. “Three footbridges down,” said this birding/island life sage. We pressed on, and a young woman said something similar - “just over there, by night shift.” A few minutes later we saw the crowd, and then…

Well, it doesn’t look like much in my digiscoped photo. But it was a nice reddish brown color, with the weird nightjar shape one expects from field guides. It is simply Cool to see a bird that is so different from the typical layout. Passersby were less impressed. One college age chap with an English accent said something like “I have no idea what the hell that is” in reaction to everyone staring at a lump in a tree. But the birders knew. Birding Jimmy Buffet knew. 

If only twitching was always so close and so reliable, I would hit every one - and my performance at the gym and work would suffer. 

Kei trucks and transport

 Obsessed today with the idea of buying a kei truck. Picture below in case you aren’t familiar. According to a little reading I’ve been doing, they can haul realistic amounts of stuff (~1000-1500 lbs), have decent mileage (~35 mpg), and go at, uh, “highway legal” speeds (~55-60 mph). Getting one from the 90s is about $3500, or in brain speak, one vespa, three spotting scopes, seven bikes, or 35 trips to deluxe town diner (where I buy). So reasonable!

I do have a habit of making some purchases imagining that I have a different life than I currently do. For example, got a road bike maybe two years ago spurred on by visions of flitting off to go birding before work, unfettered by transit lines, popping over to places for a coffee on weekends, commuting in on sunny days. When the hell do I do that? My commute is long and often early, the odds of going birding before and wanting to bike more following turned out to be pretty low, and anyhow I wasn’t in any shape to properly use the super low drops on the road bike (why did I get that one??) I ended up finding online. Now, having actually used my bike recently, I may be turning the arc of the story around here, but I’m not discounting this as a cautionary tale yet.

What glamorous life am I picturing with a tiny truck? Hauling…something? Do I really want to be the guy all my friends call when they’re moving? Do I really want to be in a paper thin cab on the MA freeways, a state where the average car size is “heavyweight” and people skip through reds based on the “vibes” of a given intersection?

I’ve never owned a car, never really needed to. In some ways this sort of thing seems like… a trainer car. Low risk of killing people (in car-car collisions), easy to park, low cost investment if it turns out to be horrible. But not a trainer in the sense that it’s bad, people actually seem to rave over these things. Perhaps I am eager to reject the American car paradigm with a step into something just lighter. 

I won’t say part of it isn’t birding. Birding as a hobby is extremely car focused, and every rare bird twitcher talks incessantly about their birding battle station in the backseat, stopping at gas stations, sleeping in their car, whatever. It makes sense — wilderness areas are indeed further from urban centers — but the whole thing reeks of car supremacy culture in a way similar to the sneering that comes up whenever someone brings up electric cars (“That’d never work in a rural area!!”). Hence the bike. But is there a middle way? It would really be nice to autonomously chase some gull or whatnot 50 miles away. Otherwise, my autonomy tends to be limited by where train/bus lines run and my stomach for spending extra time trekking by foot. (Bike use pending.) I imagine that this desire for autonomy in my free time is sort of a reaction to the very rote, constrained nature of my day to day work. 

A kei car won’t change my life, ultimately. But it is useful to think about what I really want when I want things, in general. And we can all agree they look sick as hell. 

May big day 2024 recap

Tried for the big day, finding as many bird species as possible in a single day. Team consisted of myself and three close friends with various degrees of birding knowledge and experience. 

This is only my second spring big day. Last year we hit ~7 different locations in a mad dash to get a number of expected species at each one. Last fall we went to plum island and poked around there all day. After looking at the stats for may big day 2023, parker river NWR (plum island) I think blew any other hotspot out of the water in terms of total species, so going for high counts, this seemed like the spot. We were also restricted in terms of timing, so we decided to go for a very early morning to early afternoon “big half day.”

ANALYSIS OF STRATEGY

Pros:

- Very nice to have coast, forest, and marsh all squished together with no real travel time between

- Quality of species was exceptional, especially many migrating warblers acting very friendly, and piping plovers, which are basically only reliable in specially marked boxes (er, beaches) way out of cambridge hotspot range

- Many other birders to “draft” off of… nothing serious, but if you see thirty people with cameras, you’re inclined to take a look. Plus overheard tips “I heard there was scarlet tanager at pines trail,” etc.

Cons:

- The common species which should be layups we found to be not so easy! We left plum island missing stuff like ring billed gull, northern cardinal, red tailed hawk, great blue heron, carolina wren - backyard birds. (Some of these we made up from highway driving on the way home or there, but not all.) Furthermore some moderately common sightings (like any woodpeckers at all) and even some expected species (peeps) were just not present. (Not entirely true - at one point 30 peeps flew overhead but good luck IDing those.) 

-Distance to the island makes true sunrise birding hard. Ideally you’d be in position a half hour or so before sunrise for maximum effect, but with a 90 minute drive there that puts leave-the-house at 330 am which is tough.

-Distance to the island also makes it hard to casually hit up another spot - you are kind of committed, which makes it harder if you’d rather go somewhere else to find your common species.

-High chance of “fomo,” as you have to drive down the whole island to get to different spots, which leads to a lot of straining and struggling looking out the car window. Or for instance, we stopped 3 or 4 times on our way to our “first” stop because we didn’t want to miss the species that were present right then right there… even though most of them we picked up on a later list (but not all!).

Looking at our stats (non “incidental” or drive-by locations) hellcat loop stands out as particularly productive and the other locations less so, especially pines trail. I’m mainly focused on the “unique birds per minute,” which counts birds only found on one checklist. However, hellcat has the edge here of being earlier in the day.  If we had more time, I would have paired this with a visit to arlington reservoir or something to pick up our missing easy species. I think 90-100 could have been possible. (Spoilers for below: we did not get 90-100 species.)

TRIP HIGHLIGHTS AND THOUGHTS

From a birding perspective, highlight was seeing a way out of range yellow headed blackbird. They’re not supposed to be anywhere near here, so we couldn’t believe it, but all the ID matched up and later on other found it with pictures (and “cited” us, which was cool). We hadn’t even intended to stop where it was, just paused to look at some ospreys and 10 minutes later it flushed. My only lifer of the trip.

Getting up at 4 am definitely put some wear and tear on people. I say that we would pair with another afternoon visit for more species, but we may have needed to build in nap time.

Janice opted to go for binoculars instead of a camera this year. I think this was better for getting everyone on the birds and moving quickly , and without sandpipers we really didn’t need any photos for tricky IDs. But it does make people less impressed with your list when you’ve got nothing to show.

Food is essential. Egg bagels for breakfast, made that morning with great effort by Blake, chips and mini cinnamon rolls for snacks, Iggy’s bread sandwiches for lunch. 

Blake and Bhavish are newer birders than me so I wasn’t sure if it would be an annoying day of me pointing out stuff that people would miss (annoying to them, not me). As soon as we got on the walk to the hellcat loop (which was super crowded, even at 630 am!) they had both spotted warblers with correct ID. No worries there - everyone was great about spotting, calling, and looking for field marks so the final lists are in good parity.

It was very funny to see people’s clear ranking of the warblers. At one point on the hellcat boardwalk we had incredible views of ovenbird, black-throated blue warbler, northern parula, but everybody was straining like crazy to see the mostly obscured canada warbler.

I only regretted my scope choices for 1 checklist - didn’t take it for the pines trail but then absolutely needed it for the overlook when there was nothing in the forest at all.

Favorite find was probably black-throated blue warbler. Been a long time nemesis of mine and happy to get a great look. 

RESULTS AND OUTLOOK

Trip report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/236029

Overall we got 77 species on the trip. (I happened to find 2 more in my backyard that afternoon putting my ranking somewhere in the low hundreds for massachusetts. Improved over last year’s 70 species so really can’t complain.

Not sure if I’ll want to do the same sort of thing next spring or fall. This makes me want to do more birding in the essex area to try and build a map of reliable species the same way I (sort of) have for middlesex/suffolk. That way Parker river can be a stop and not the whole day. Alternatively, something like a “big sit” could be a fun alternative challenge. Would also like to try some night spots to get owls, etc.