| The Rochester group did a Big Day on Thursday 5/13. In
spite of the very rainy and wet weather all morning, we had a good day.
We didn't break our old record of 152 species from 1994, but we did record
a new second best record of 143 species.
We did our best ever finding of warblers by finding 23 species,
including Cerulean, Golden-winged, Cape May, Blackpoll, Bay-breasted, and
some late-arriving Wilson's.
Shorebirds were the most difficult. All of the reservoirs
are very full with almost no exposed mud along the shoreline and most of
the fields have been worked/planted. Our only shorebird finds were
in a very small farm pond and in a few remaining corn stubble fields with
water from the recent rains still retained between the rows.
New birds for our composite list (kept since 1985) were the Carolina
Wren at Kottke's, Lark Sparrow at the west access at Chester Woods (new
Olmsted Co bird for me this year - thanks Chuck) and (of all things) a Willet,
the one shorebird we found at the East Landfill Reservoir.
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