Or, in this SoFla birder’s experience, the (yawn) ho-hum backyard bird count. The cold, cold winds on Saturday pushed down the bird count considerably, I’m sure, even though I was home to do some counting, since the lad was sick. He really does his best to help his dad’s birding, but the weather was just a bit too much for him to handle.
Saturday night brought me into much more intimate acquaintance with the lad’s illness, as the beasties bugging him took up temporary residence in my GI tract, making for a very unpleasant Sunday as well. The less said about that, the better…
So, without further ado, and in no particular order, here is the teensy little list I was able to accumulate for the Great Backyard Bird Count weekend:
Wood Stork (a new yard bird, too!)
American Kestrel
Cooper’s Hawk
Turkey Vulture
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Northern Mockingbird
Blue Jay
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Palm Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Boat-tailed Grackle
Common Grackle
European Starling
Black-hooded Parakeet
Eurasian Collared-Dove
Rock Pigeon
Mourning Dove
Not bad, I suppose, for a tiny little yard in what passes for urban Boca Raton… Maybe I’d have done even better if I’d been able to spend more than a few minutes at a stretch looking. Can’t believe I missed White Ibis, Black Vulture, and Cattle Egret—those are among the most regular species of my yard birding. And all January, I heard Killdeer overhead, too. But none for a while now…
But to have a Wood Stork grace the yard (well, the airspace of the yard—it flew directly over my property, so I get to count it!) was a great event. They’re such incredible birds; the picture below is from a trip to Merritt Island in 2008, but the one that flew overhead on Saturday doesn’t look much different:
