More June Challenge discoveries

Here’s what a birder’s life is like:

After hearing from Jonathan Mays about the Caspian Tern, I ran down to Palm Point and sat for an hour with my spotting scope. Although it was beautifully quiet, there was no tern of any description. I went home. A couple of hours later I got a call from Jonathan. He and Peter Polshek were at Palm Point, looking at the Caspian Tern. So I drove back to Palm Point and spent about an hour and a half with Jonathan and Peter, and the Caspian never showed up again.

I’d been planning to go to La Chua at about 6:30 this evening, but I’d spent too much time NOT seeing the Caspian, so when I got back in my car at 7:15 I headed home and ate dinner instead of birding at La Chua. So of course I got this email from Jonathan a little while ago:

“Good evening on La Chua! Rained on my hike out but got to the platform to find Charlene Leonard and Will Sexton already there and having already nailed down some good stuff. They’d spotted the 2 Roseate Spoonbills and an adult Yellow-crowned Night Heron and I was able to get some photos. They also had a nice flock of shorebirds (48+ total, not counting Black-necked Stilts or Killdeer) pinned down for me, though they didn’t stay pinned for long. The rain picked up but I risked taking the camera out anyway … haven’t sorted through the images yet but we had minimum counts of 31 Semipalmated Sandpipers, 3 Least Sandpipers, 2 Lesser Yellowlegs, 1 Greater Yellowlegs, and 1 Dunlin. Our Dunlin was still mostly basic plumage and showed no black in the belly, or at least we didn’t see any, so perhaps a different bird than the one you all had last night? There were another 10-12 peeps that didn’t stay put and I never got to sort through them with the scope. Probably mostly (all) more Semipalmateds. Amazing.

“Just before leaving, Charlene spotted the Whooping Crane way the heck out on the opposite side of the lake. We walked back post-sunset and heard, then saw, a Barn Owl flying out west of the trail towards the 441 observation platform. About 5 minutes later we heard then saw a second come off the boardwalk railing. I got photos of the first, and maybe the second. We joked about seeing 2 Barns when we were really hunting you-all’s Great Horneds from the previous evening. Right about then we spotted another owl farther down on the railing … but larger and with ear tufts.”

Jonathan will be posting his photos from today, including a fantastic flight photo of the Caspian Tern, on his Flickr site, so have a look: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jmays/