Interesting post. I went back through my old BirdBase state personal
records for Red-necked Grebe and found four for March 1994 - Craney, CBBT,
and two in Chesterfield County including one on the private lake where we
lived at the time. And one at Sandy River Reservoir in Prince Edward
County in 2003!
Wendy Ealding
Chesterfield County
On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Ned Brinkley <23cahow@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
Yesterday afternoon at about 2:39 p.m., I saw a gull resembling a
first-cycle Thayer's Gull off the eastern side of the public island (Island
1) of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. I took a half-dozen photos as the
bird flushed and flew northward. It looked fine for Thayer's overall; the
outer (distal) portion of tertials showed barring, perhaps indication of
_kumlieni_ genes, but a majority of photos of juvenile Thayer's in the
Howell and Dunn guide show this pattern.
An adult Thayer's was reported not far away, at Fort Story, earlier in the
winter, and at least three Iceland and three Glaucous (plus a Glaucous x
Herring hybrid) have been noted at CBBT and vicinity in the past two weeks.
This could be a "good" winter for white-winged gulls in Virginia, which is
a rather rare phenomenon. Although the correlation is not perfect, it does
seem that harsher/colder winters around the Great Lakes produce higher
counts of Glaucous, Iceland, and Thayer's Gulls in the mid-Atlantic.
Forecasts are for bitterly cold temperatures in the western Great Lakes in
the next few weeks, which could drive more birds off the freezing lakes.
Lake ice extent can be monitored online almost in 'real' time:
http://coastwatch.glerl.noaa.gov/cwdata/lct/glsea.png
The most recent substantial influxes of white-winged gulls occurred 10 and
20 years ago, respectively. Twenty years ago, the Great Lakes essentially
froze over in late January and early February (1994), causing a massive
exodus of wintering Red-necked Grebes, with a single flock of 179 seen off
Fisherman Island in late March that year. An even larger (or perhaps just
better communicated and documented because of the internet) influx of
grebes occurred in February/March 2003, involving 721+ birds statewide.
Again, Great Lakes had mostly frozen over.
So in case Snowy Owls have begun to lose their allure (!), it's worth
watching lakes and coasts (and landfills) for grebes and gulls. Remember
that the very cold winters of the mid-1970s produced an unmatched count of
10,000+ Horned Grebes at the CBBT. It takes an army of observers to figure
out the effects of weather/climate on birds, but these "escape" flights
during hard winters can occur suddenly, and even one birder in the right
place and right time can make a momentous discovery!
Ned Brinkley
Cape Charles, Va.
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