Stimulated by Nick Flanders' reports from earlier today, I called Andrew
Baldelli to see if he was interested in chasing the blackbird. He
arrived at my house from Rudee Inlet in less than half an hour. We
headed out and after about an hour and fifteen minutes of driving
arrived at the spot where Nick had seen the birds roughly two and a half
hours earlier. There were no blackbirds to be seen and there was no
cell phone signal to call Nick to verify our location. We drove back
into Ivor where the signal was better, but weren't able to reach Nick.
We weren't able to reach a cup of coffee either since Ivor lacks even a
convenience store. We reversed course and drove back to Nick's spot.
This time there were blackbirds. Grackles and redwings. Thousands of
them! While we were setting up our scopes, Nick called and we verified
that we were in the right place. We scoped the blackbirds flying,
feeding, swirling, perching in trees and more of the same. This went on
for over an hour. The grackles were picking up some food items
(peanuts?) and carrying them back to the trees to eat. But there was no
sign of a big black bird with a bright yellow head. Then while scanning
the thousands of birds in the trees for an hour and fifteen minutes from
the time we began the scan, there IT was staring at me. I tightened the
scope and called to Andrew who leaped over in time to see the bird
before it dropped out of view. High fives and off to Windsor for a late
lunch.....with coffee.
Cheers,
Bob
PS The field is along Southampton County route 616, 6 miles southwest
of Ivor, just west of Berlin (nothing more than a crossroad) on the
south side of the road behind a pen with a pony. Be prepared for lots of
blackbirds at a considerable distance. We wouldn't have found the bird
without a scope.
