We stayed on the edge of Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk, and took advantage of the latter municipality’s canine-friendly beach regulations to tire Quetzal out at the beginning and end of each day.

Between the doggie’s needs and the windy weather, we did less birding than we’d anticipated, but still visited a great many of what we were told were the best localities.

One surprise—it probably shouldn’t have been—was the number of lesser black-backed gulls on the outer beaches. Indeed, on our first walk at Kitty Hawk, the first flock of two dozen larids we saw was no less than fifty percent lesser black-backeds, a source of real astonishment just a few decades ago.

We also did some exploring farther inland. Mattamuskeet, windy and cold and with the sun in the wrong place of an afternoon, was a lot of fun all the same, and here we saw our first North Carolina anhingas.

There’s a real delight in forgetting, or not knowing, to expect so fantastic a bird on a trip and finding it nonetheless.

The swans were a similarly fine surprise. I knew we’d see some, but I’m quite certain that we saw by at least one order of magnitude more than my lifetime total up to that point: the tundra swan is a species I’ve seen regularly and in numbers only in southern New Jersey, with ones and twos and tiny flocks in the midwest and the northwest over the years. Here, this past week, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, on lakes and sounds and often at amazingly close range.

A nice end to the Old Year.

But it wasn’t just gourmands and their suppliers roaming the aisles. Collectors, too, museum men and private hobbyists alike, made the big urban game markets a regular stop on their rounds in search of rare specimens, and the early ornithological journals reported on their finds.

In January 1885, for example, Boston purveyors offered a notable plenty of northern hawk owls, though pine grosbeaks and snow buntings were markedly scarce. Ptarmigan, shipped in from Labrador, were going for a dollar and a half or two dollars a pair, an attractive price for dealers in naturalia: “From the way several prominent taxidermists are prospecting in the vicinity, we are led to believe that more than one eye is on a future corner in the market.”

From even farther afield, sharp-tailed grouse were “nearly as plentiful” in the stalls as prairie chickens, and “several barrels of blue grouse”—whether duskies or sooties I cannot say—arrived in December. Unfortunately, most of the grouse had had their heads removed for shipping, a disappointment to the collectors, one of whom—”F[rancis] B[each] W[hite]” of Boston—found consolation where he might: at least, he wrote, “the flesh was white, juicy and tender, in our opinion far superior to that of the common [presumably the ruffed] Grouse.”

As one of the best-known bird painters of the twentieth century, Allan Brooks is a familiar name to most birders. Before his art was more widely recognized, Brooks devoted much of his time and owed much of his income to securing and preparing Canadian birds and mammals for collectors in the US and England. Summer of 1901 found him far to the northwest of his Okanagan Landing home, working in the Cariboo. From a base at 158-Mile House, Brooks made collecting excursions throughout the Horsefly area, including to nearby Carpenter Mountain.

Tennessee warblers arrived there May 22 of that year, and by June 15, “a good many” singing males were present in the area. That day, while Brooks “suffered torments from the mosquitoes,” he followed a female to her nest, whence he “put her off and shot her … as she fluttered off.” Over the next week, he found several more nests, some with eggs and some with nestlings; it is unclear whether he collected the little chicks, but he did take the nests with eggs, which “contained small embryos.” (Auk, January 1902) By 1905, one set, shown in the photo above (Oologist, September 1905), entered the cabinets of J. Parker Norris, Jr., in Philadelphia, joining “an unparalleled long series of wood warbler eggs [that] alone occupied more than an entire large cabinet” (Kiff, “History of the WFVZ,” 2000).

As Kiff tells us, fully half of that enormous oological collection, including most of the North American eggs, passed after Norris’s death into the hands of Nelson Hoy. Over a long life, this Pennsylvania collector amassed some 15,030 sets of eggs (Kiff, “Bird Egg Collections,” Auk 1979), making it the largest such collection privately held in North America.

I do not know whether that collection, which absorbed many others in the twilight period of American oology, was accessible to researchers during Hoy’s lifetime, but he “entertained scout groups and school groups on an almost daily basis” in his private museum in suburban Philadelphia. A year after Hoy’s death in 1979, the nests and eggs—which “more than filled a 42-foot trailer truck“—were moved to the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology, where they remain today.

1903:

And twice in 1904:

This year, as in several of the past years, we’ll be counting at Mill Creek Marsh, in Secaucus. Let me know if you’d like to join us this coming Sunday morning.

The highlights were many, including great views of white-fronted and yellow-headed parrots, that latter a seasonal visitor to the immediate area that waits for the cashews to fruit each spring. We also enjoyed a female green-breasted mango feeding young at a nest, rose-throated becards at startlingly close range, nice views of a bat falcon and lineated woodpeckers. . . .

You get the idea.

Entertainment over breakfast was provided by palm and yellow-throated warblers and a ringed kingfisher perched just outside the dining room. It was growing warm by then, but I set out on the nearby Limpkin Trail, a short path through wet woods with ten parulid species, unusually visible spot-breasted wrens, a russet-naped wood rail, barred antshrike, and on and on. With so many birds, I figured I had walked a great distance over those two and a half hours, but when I turned around so as not to miss lunch at the lodge, I found that I was no more than a briskish five minutes out.

The heat and humidity were sensible after lunch, but still bearable. More warblers in the little campground included a northern parula, and Kathy and Robert appeared just as my first lifer of the visit did, a splendid little Yucatan woodpecker. Two different groups of soaring birds continued to provide excitement: black vultures formed and re-formed flocks of up to 80 birds at a time, and gray-breasted martins made us laugh every time as they plunged into the water to bathe and then shook themselves in the air like so many flighted dogs. Always something to enjoy!

And tomorrow should be even finer. We’ll start with another quick walk, then breakfast, then out on the boats to see what we may see.

Right on the shores of Crooked Tree Lagoon, Birds Eye View will be our comfortable home base for the next couple of days. Toni and I arrived mid-afternoon, leaving us time for a little birding before the rest of our group arrives, and it has been well worth it. Among our highlights so far: the black-collared hawk that flapped in to land just a few yards away, and several lesser yellow-headed vultures skimming the low treetops in search of carrion. And of course, the dapper little Morelet seedeater, a bird that if it isn’t everyone’s favorite should be.

Birding starts up in earnest tomorrow morning. Can’t wait!

In my experience, the handsome gadwall is not a species given to much variation or aberration in color. This hen’s patchy white head and face was obviously no deterrent to her suitor.

At Barnegat Light, on our Montclair Bird Club visit February 26. There are few places on the US east coast where harlequin ducks can be found so easily.

And much the same goes for another haunter of wintertime jetties, the sweet little Ipswich sparrow.

I am nearly tempted to rotate this photo 90 degrees, but this is really what they look like, scaling the granite blocks and picking through the seaweed in search of prey.

Just a few weeks left this year for both these species in the state, so get out before it’s too late!

Noisy and colorful, the eastern towhee appears to have been a well-known bird to early European settlers in North America. Indeed, this big and conspicuous sparrow was the subject of one of the first bird paintings ever made by a European naturalist on this continent.

The caption to this copy of John White’s sixteenth-century watercolor reminds us just how many folk names, and in how many languages, this bird has had over the centuries. I was reminded of another one this morning—one that I believe is attested in the writings of only one ornithologist.

In his manuscript list of the birds of Point Breeze, Charles Lucien Bonaparte calls the towhee “chitterwing.” On his return to Italy in 1827, he used the same name in the Specchio comparative, and it occurs again in the German-language reprint of that work in the 1834 volume of the Isis von Oken. In each instance, “chitterwing” is the only English name assigned the species.

It is very rare that a vernacular bird name turns out to be genuinely hapax in the ornithological corpus, but I think that this one is. Or have you run across it elsewhere? And if you have, what do you think its origin is?

For whatever reasons: the bird pictured below may have been one of them, hunting the low vegetation before flying up to perch in the twigs in front of us.

This fine adult (probably a male) Cooper hawk could hardly have chosen a more suitable place to show up, especially in this, the 225th anniversary year of the birth of the species’ eponym, William Cooper. For it was here, on the grounds of Point Breeze, that the type specimen was collected one late September day.

Charles Bonaparte, then living at Point Breeze with his wife and their family, had the bird drawn and engraved by Alexander Lawson, who, writes Bonaparte, had “outdone himself” in the “perfect accuracy” of his “delineation of this bird, in all the details of its plumage, bill, and feet.”

Bonaparte named the bird for William Cooper, the famous malacologist, who alongside other favors oversaw the publication of the American Ornithology on Bonaparte’s return to Europe at the end of 1826. Coincidentally, Bonaparte reports that Cooper himself collected what appears to have been the first female specimen of the species just a couple of months later on Long Island.

It would be too much by far to imagine that this morning’s bird was a descendant of Bonaparte’s type (especially given that that bird may have been shot before it was sufficiently mature to breed). But still I like to think that some accipitrine spirit dwells in the place.

I spoke to a pleasant woman in Bordentown this morning, who told me that access to Point Breeze is at present limited to the sidewalks between the new visitor center and the town hall—which hardly counts as access at all. But as soon as the state opens the woods and the ruins of the Bonaparte estate to the public, we’ll put together an excursion to explore the place together.