Andy's Green Big Year

Changing into a summer coat After a while mostly away from home and/or home with rotten weather, I took the opportunity to get out and ride today. What a beautiful day! So nice to have more "normal" weather for a change.  I decided to head over to a local hotspot, Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve, which is close to where I used to live. This relatively large block of forested, grassland, and wetland habitat is a great spot for migrant warblers and also has breeding Hooded Warblers, Acadian Flycatchers, and sometimes Cerulean Warblers. Migration is definitely winding down here so I figured I had better get out and try to get stuff before it was gone until fall.  I got up early to try to get there around dawn. It was a very early alarm - ugh. But I managed to peel myself out of bed and get on the bike. I will admit I was not feeling it at first. Even an immediate pick up of several birds at a nearby grassland (Grasshopper Sparrow, Sedge Wren, and others) in the emerging light did n...

Brown Thrasher at his post - singing away Good morning, everyone! It has been crazy last few weeks. As I often tell friends, May is both my favorite and least favorite month. So much is going on, all at once. Still, having peak bird migration is a special time and I always try to soak it in as much as I can. After all, we only get a limited number of these in our lives.  This post will be short and (bad) photo heavy, but here's a brief synopsis of what I've been up to green birding wise. I've been heavily focusing on my local go-to spot: Louisville Swamp. I'm trying to do my best to get as many shorebirds while I can. It's been going pretty well! I'm up to 17 species of shorebirds now for my green list. I still have some work to do there, but I've found some good ones. I've swept the "peeps" with a couple of White-rumped Sandpipers that were in a nice flock of mixed shorebirds and lucked into a Hudsonian Godwit as well. That was a great surpris...

This week was a pretty active week - lots of new arrivals, and I was able to get out a good bit and enjoy it. I visited nearby Louisville Swamp twice since my last post, and also rode my bike into work again. Last weekend of April, I ran down to Louisville Swamp hoping for some shorebirds and maybe some grassland birds on a kind of last minute trip in the late afternoon. People had been reporting American Avocets, and I was hoping to see some of this relatively early species before they mostly moved on. I rounded the final corner and looked down the road- smoke! The Refuge staff were just finishing up a prescribed burn. The conditions were perfect for them and it had gone well, but that pretty much dashed any hopes I had of grassland birds that day. They had just opened the trails back up, so I headed down to the water. Nice mix of dabblers Unfortunately, there weren't many shorebirds to speak of, which was disappointing. Lots of waterfowl though. There were a few Northern ...