The first week of December has featured mainly mid winter like conditions with a few bouts of snow, cold mornings and cold days with some highs not reaching the freezing mark. Nonetheless I have managed to set myself on a record setting pace for the month with 90 species so far. Some mornings I had to stay fairly close to home for Wilson and a few others I was able to explore a bit more afield. I'll cover each day since the second below with the highlights for each day.
Today I stayed around the south Quabbin area with a predawn start looking for owls on a calm morning and found three species. I then spent some time looking for waterfowl (and finding little) and some other species I had not yet had for the month.
Yesterday I awoke to find it had snowed a bit overnight and continued to flurry a bit. I was initially going to stay in the Quabbin area but decided to head east to try to get out of the snow and headed down to the Holyoke Dam to add Mute Swan for the month. I not only had the swans but also a group of White winged Scoters just above the dam. I then headed over the mountain and stopped at Lower Mill Pond for Northern Shoveler, Northern Pintail and Black Vulture before heading to a small part of Arcadia where I found a couple more overwintering Yellow rumped Warblers. I was having a great morning so hoped to extend that with a stop in the East Meadows and I had good luck there too with a Lapland Longspur, Rough legged Hawk and a large group of Snow Geese (with a great selection of plumages including adults and juveniles of both color morphs plus a number of oxide stained birds). I made a few more stops for the morning and by the end had added nine new species for the month.
On Friday the 5th I stayed around the Quabbin area and froze my butt off with very cold temps. I added a few species of waterfowl as well as a flyover Evening Grosbeak.
I had some time on the 4th to head over to Great Pond where I found the pond nearly totally frozen solid. Although waterfowl was in short supply I added a number of sparrows as well as others..unfortunately no luck relocating the Common Yellowthroat I had there at the end of November.
The third found me staying close to home with the most productive stop being Lake Wallace where I had the continued Eastern Phoebe, flyover Red Crossbills and a very inquisitive River Otter.
