Greetings,
On Saturday 28 May, I headed down to the Emporia area, and the counties to
the east and west of it with Sue Heath, Bev Leeuwenburg, and Mike Day. I've
loved this part of the state since first going there in 2002, and have tried
to get back at least once every spring since.
The goal of this trip is to drive around Greensville and Southampton
Counties looking for kites. The secondary goal is to find a few birds that
are a
whole lot harder to find elsewhere in the state, notably Bachman's Sparrow,
Swainson's Warbler, and Anhinga. The bonus of going down there is finding
scores of birds that are more common in the southern parts of Virginia, that I
don't see every day up here.
We got to Emporia around midday on Saturday and headed southeast toward
Little Texas. We picked up our first kite along Route 615 in Southampton
County,
an adult. We managed two more on either 615 or 662, the road that heads
into Little Texas. At Little Texas we found one field that had four or five
birds over it, very distant.
We checked the spot on the Meherrin at the Southampton/Greensville County
line along Low Ground Road where we've been able to find Swainson's Warbler
consistently since 2002. We weren't able to find a bird here on Saturday with
two visits to the spot. From here we checked a few other similar looking
spots, but had no luck. We did find good numbers of Prothonotary Warblers,
Yellow-throated Warblers, Summer Tanagers, Hooded Warblers, Yellow-throated
Vireos, Red-eyed Vireos, White-eyed Vireos, Blue Grosbeaks, Barred Owls,
Yellow-billed Cuckoos, Prairie Warblers, a few Parulas, and probably other
things that
I'm forgetting. We looked in at Taylor's Millpond for Anhinga, but only
found a few cormorants.
We headed up to Emporia around six PM to check into our rooms south of town
at the reasonable Comfort Inn. Had dinner at Appleby's, where the service
was poor, but my fajitas were pretty good. We left the restaurant at about
seven-thirty and went out looking for things that make noise in the night. We
went west from Emporia to the Brunswick/Greensville line, along Hells Island
Road. We were at some good habitat when the sun went down here, and the
Whip-poor-wills (WPWI) started singing, eventually joined by a
Chuck-wills-widow
(CWWI), all in Greensville County. We poked into Brunswick and hit a couple
other spots, and heard more CWWI and a couple more WPWI. We hit a spot at a
creek along Route 602 east of Triplet and heard a Screech-Owl, and saw a
Barred fly in on silhouette. We leapfrogged back to the east to listen for
goatsuckers in Southampton. We were able only to find a spot that had four
CWWI
singing, along 662 a mile or so before it ends at the south.
The next morning had us checking a couple spots in Greensville for
Swainson's Warbler. We finally got one, singing at the very spot we've had it
in the
past; the Meherrin at the county line on Low Ground Road. We then retreated
back to Brunswick to put some effort into searching for Bachman's Sparrow.
We found one very good looking field along Hells Island Road just east of the
county line (thus still in Greensville), but we didn't hear a Bachman's.
There are some field sparrows here that do two short introductory notes before
the trill, and they can easily get you excited. If it isn't doing a "classic"
Bachman's song, I'd really want to see the bird. We checked a couple other
spots in Brunswick, but no love.
By now, Sue was jonesing and in a bad way, desperate for a county listing
fix. We shot her up with a little Brunswick, but what really saved her was a
nice slow plunger push of Mecklenburg. She's got a proper list there now,
over 100 species. The first stop was Dick Cross WMA, where there was singing
Yellow-throated Warbler(s), Acadian Flycatcher, Red-eyed Vireo, a phoebe on
nest in the blind, and a sub-adult Mississippi Kite over the Clyde's Pond
parking area, among a few other birds. We then visited the mispronounced Kerr
Dam,
finding loads of Cliff Swallows, lots of Cormorants, Summer Tanagers, Orchard
Oriole, Hooded Warbler, Osprey, Spotted Sandpiper, Great Blue Heron, and a
few other things, all at the downstream side of the dam. We popped up to the
lake, and the wind was blowing, which was fine for the 42 foot Beneteau that
sailed by, but not great for finding birds. We left, headed to Red Lawn
Road, and found the pair or Loggerhead Shrikes previously reported. We saw
two
birds atop a tree, however a bird was singing, and the birds we had weren't
opening their bills, so I'm suggesting there was a third.
From here it was onto I-85, and back home, via Stafford County.
Cheers,
Todd
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Todd Michael Day
Jeffersonton, Virginia, USA
BlkVulture@xxxxxxx
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