Cheney Comes Through!

Early on the morning of the 14th, Joseph, Anthony, Bryant and I loaded up and headed out toward Cheney.  We went straight to Yoder Point, hoping to be there when the gulls headed out from the lake.  After some brief scanning of the usual gulls and waterfowl, Anthony noticed some large wading birds.   Upon closer examination with the scope, we could tell they were Whooping Cranes!  Neither Bryant or I had seen them in Reno before and they were also year birds for everybody!

That is what Whooping Cranes look like from 1 mile away.

We stayed there for about 45 minutes and had several nice flocks of Bonaparte's Gulls, year birds for Joseph.

From there we worked our way down to the dam, stopping at several points along the way.  We did not see much, but when we got on top of the dam we saw a vast swath of waterfowl far out on the lake.

That dark out there is all ducks!  This was only part of the flock.

We got as close as we could and started scoping.  The majority of them were Mallards, Redhead, and Scaup, but there were also good numbers of many other species.  When my turn at the scope came, I noticed two large Grebes in with the ducks.  They were Western/Clark's types, but before we could look closely at them a boat came and scared all the birds further out.   We managed to refind one of the Grebes, and after extensive viewing we were pretty sure it was a Clark's.  Unfortunately, separating the two is very challenging and we couldn't ever tell for sure.

This is the distance we were dealing with on the Grebes.

While we keeping an eye on the Grebe, I took a quick binocular scan around and almost immediately saw a Black Scoter!  A lifer for everybody!  It was swimming closer to us, but the the same boat that scared the other birds came by and scared it off.  I was pretty annoyed.

Black Scoter

Black Scoter: picture by Bryant.

We stayed and watched the Grebes for a while, hoping they would come closer.  Unfortunately, the occasional boat kept them a long way off.  As we were walking back to the vehicle, Anthony and Joseph noticed a swallow.  Any swallow is exceptional at this time of year, but the most expected would be a Tree Swallow.  It turns out that this was a Barn Swallow, about the third latest it has ever been seen in Kansas!

As we headed out we stopped at a couple more points and found a Winter Wren, a year bird for Bryant!

It felt good to have another really good day of birding since, none of us have had a good one for a while!

Since all the other pics in this post were terrible, I will throw this one to hopefully counteract that:)

Andrew

India 2015 | Part Two: Dimapur

This is the second of several posts I've been writing about our trip to India in late April. The first post can be found here, India 2015 | Part One: Kolkata.

We landed in the mid afternoon at the not-so-bustling Dimapur Airport. We were greeted by many Asian Palm Swifts and other unidentified swifts swirling around.

Landing in Dimapur

Once we arrived at our host's house I popped outside to see what I could find. It was hot and there was little to see in the middle of the afternoon, but I did find some of the more common species such as Red-vented Bulbuls, Common Tailorbirds, and  Oriental Magpie-robins.

A loudly chirping Red-vented Bulbul.

 These somewhat annoying bulbuls (they sound like this) were ubiquitous everywhere we went in India.

Typical village scene

Asian Palm Swift

This is currently my best digibinned photo of a swift, by a very large margin.

In contrast, here is a wretched real-camera pic I snagged of a fly-by probable Grey-hooded Treepie. These corvids reminded me a lot of our jays and magpies back home with their loud, grating calls.

Photography was quite challenging due to the prevalent low light, (we arrived at the beginning of the monsoon season) so please excuse the poor photo quality in these posts.

Grey-breasted Prinias were quite common in Nagaland. This individual was singing loudly, a trill reminiscent of Chipping Sparrows.

I saw a few other interesting species (full list here ) including a White-throated Kingfisher and a White-rumped Shama (amazing birds) the next morning before leaving for a village deep in the hills of Kohima state.

And with that, stay tuned for the next installment; From the Village of Tseminyu.

Joseph