[va-bird] Occoquan and the Great Marsh at Mason Neck

[Philip Kline <pgkline_uk@xxxxxxxxx>]

I headed down to Occoquan NWR with Jason Waanders
yesterday.  Neither of us had ever had close looks at
American tree sparrows so, with the recent posts,
Occoquan sounded like the place to look.

I'd never been to this spot before, and it's certainly
an excellent sparrow spot.  We saw many song,
savannah, and white-throated sparrows, but didn't
manage to find any fox or field sparrows.  One
gentleman we saw reported seeing WHITE-CROWNED
SPARROWS, but we didn't see any.  We were having no
luck finding tree sparrows until we headed back on the
Deephole Point trail between the gazebo and the
turnoff to the pond.  We ran into a large flock of
about 35-40 juncos scattered along the trail and saw a
few sparrows mixed in at the distant end of the flock.
 At first, from a distance, they looked a lot like
chipping sparrows in breeding plumage with an apparent
dark stripe through the eye and paler supercillium. 
As we got closer and scattered the flock into nearby
bushes, however, we got some really nice looks at what
turned out to be a total of four AMERICAN TREE
SPARROWS.  They looked particularly bright and
beautiful with the sun reflecting off the snow (we
noticed that the cardinals also looked brighter in the
sun and snow and were fooled briefly by a female
red-winged blackbiird that appeared to be rather
pale-bellied caused by what we soon figured out was
probably the sun reflecting back up off the snow).  I
noticed that the tree sparrows have a habit of rapidly
flicking their tails very slightly while perched.  I
know a lot of sparrows do this, but it would be
interesting to compare how, because I'd wager that
each species does it slightly differently, the tree
sparrow's tail flicking seemed to be distinctive in
its rapid frequency and apparent somewhat sideways and
downwards motion.  Other notable birds at Occoquan
were a large raft of roughly 3-5000 LESSER SCAUP with
a handful of CANVASBACK mixed in, a few mini flotillas
of RUDDY DUCKS and several flyby COMMON MERGANSERS, a
very furtive WINTER WREN in the rocks along the bay
shore, and a lone (and very bright yellow) EASTERN
MEADOWLARK near the parking lot.    

We then headed to the Great Marsh at Mason Neck.  The
visibility was rather poor in the late afternoon sun,
but we certainly heard the large flock of TUNDRA SWANS
wintering there.  From what I could make out, there
were well over 200 swans on the mudflats, and perhaps
more than 300.  Duck diversty was low; we could only
make out BLACK DUCKS, but 3 GREATER YELLOWLEGS flew in
briefly and fed on the exposed mudflats.  We heard a
GREAT HORNED OWL intermittently hooting in the
distance, presumably from somehwere in the trees
around the edge of the marsh.  Jason spotted a HERMIT
THRUSH by the trail on the way back to the parking lot
for a nice end to the day.

Philip Kline   

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[va-bird] Occoquan and the Great Marsh at Mason Neck