Saturday valley birding

Peregrine Falcon, Bridge Lane, Hatfield, MA, Nov 17, 2012

 

Peregrine Falcon, Bridge Lane, Hatfield, MA, Nov 17, 2012

Peregrine Falcon, Bridge Lane, Hatfield, MA, Nov 17, 2012

Headed out near dawn with Ian Davies to try to find something unusual.  We started at the UMASS Pond which was empty first thing in the morning.  We then headed down to the Holyoke Dam area to try to find some unusual gulls.  We only had Ring billed Gulls here (the only species of gull all day).  There were a few hundred Canada Geese as well as a handful of Common Mergansers.  All the birds were below the dam and we found no birds at all above the dam.  We then worked our way back north through South Hadley and then over the bridge and up to Hatfield and Whately.  We were looking for geese but found very few over here.  We checked various fields as well as Great Pond (only species of waterfowl here was a lone Black Duck).  There was little activity in the fields besides a few small groups of sparrows, several large (50+) flocks of Horned Larks, a Northern Harrier, a pair of Peregrine Falcons perched at the top of some high tension towers along Bridge Lane in Hatfield.  We crossed the bridge into Sunderland and continued back south through Amherst and North Hadley.  Along Russleville Road we spotted large groups of geese heading mainly west.  There were at least 1200 geese but we were not able to pull out anything unusual.  Again we ran across more groups of Horned Larks.  We tried some additional fields in North Hadley but never caught up with the large groups of geese.  We did find a few hundred geese on the athletic fields at UMASS but only a few at the campus pond.  Overall not too much activity and we failed to catch up with anything really unusual.  You never know what you will find until you get out there and check.

Long tailed Ducks, Winsor Dam, Nov 17, 2012

White winged Scoters, Winsor Dam, Nov 17, 2012

After lunch I headed over to Winsor Dam for a brief time and found some waterfowl including four Long tailed Ducks, three White winged Scoters, a group of 26 Black Scoters, nine Bufflehead, a Common Loon and three Mallards.  I also had at least three Winter Wrens along Jabish Canal late morning as well as a continuing Winter Wren around the house.