Do you think the people in countries we in America describe as third-world describe themselves as third-world? Do they chant “We’re number three!”?
Sometimes
We get more than one kind of bird in the field of view.
Green Jays, Golden Fronted Woodpecker, Red-winged Blackbird, Mourning Dove.
Travel Day
Wednesday. We left our home in the Valley to rejoin our home at the beach. Now we’re bihomal. A few migrant birds in the neighborhood. Five different warblers and a waterthrush today. Tonight’s entertainment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02CSMHKg7tc
I don’t think I said what I meant to say
We didn’t see the Mitred Parakeets here at Sandpipers; they’re not here. We saw them in October 2009 in South Miami, Florida. We didn’t get to put them on the life-list then, because there wasn’t a spot to put them in the Thayer Birding Software. Now, over a year later, using eBird, there is a place to put the Mitred Parakeet. So we got a new bird without leaving Sandpipers not by seeing it here, but by recording something we saw a year ago.
Mitred Parakeet
Got another lifer today, without leaving Sandpipers. I got to thinking about exotic birds we’ve seen but couldn’t count because they weren’t listed in our birding program.
We’ve seen Great White Herons in the Keys. They’re white morphs of the Great Blue Heron. Mitred parakeets in Miami, they’re escapees that may have established breeding populations. It’s hard to tell with parrots because they live so long a few escapees can look like a breeding colony for fifty years, then die out. Wild Peafowl outside the Everglades. Maybe escapees, maybe an established population. Junglefowl in Key West. They’ve been there for years, but haven’t been studied and recognized as an independent population. Peach–faced Lovebirds in Mesa, Arizona. They look well established, but there is that problem with parrots again. They live so long.
Well, guess what…. Now we’re working with eBird, a different birding program. eBird lets us count the Mitred Parakeet. Another Life Bird!