Nick Komar’s “Biggest Year” in USA Birding - 2023

On my Recent trip to New England, the rarest bird was a common gull ( Larus canus ), a diminutive white headed larid from Europe that was staked out with a group of our familiar Ring-billed Gulls ( L . delawarensis ) in a northeast Connecticut shopping center parking lot. Encountering seagulls in a paved parking lot away from the sea coast is mundane, i.e a common phenomenon. Both Ring-billed Gull and Common Gull are well adapted to habitats dominated by humans (such as shopping centers and parking lots). These birds are not picky eaters. They will eat garbage items generated by humans (such as leftover food from household meals and restaurant kitchens) as well as fish and crustaceans found in ponds, lakes, bays, and oceans. They are also happy to accept food donations and will gladly devour any morsel of food offered by humans that pass nearby to their hangouts. In certain places, gulls have become quite confiding and will attempt to steal food from picnic baskets or even from your h

  I wrote earlier that the Christmas bird counts would play a big role in my big year effort.    In Central California, several raritities were recorded including Rock Sandpiper, Ruff, Curlew Sandpiper, Little Stint, Wood Sandpiper and Red-flanked Bluetail. All of these were on winter territories so I wanted to visit the region before they left to breed in Alaska or Siberia. Three paying customers and a local guide joined me in a week of birding from Sacramento to Los Angeles.  March 8 We arrived  around noon  to Sacramento and reviewed our itinerary with the guide over lunch. A major Pacific Ocean rainstorm was forecast to reach San Francisco within 24 hrs so we scratched plans to bird in Marin and Sonoma counties and cancelled a whale watch out of Monterey Bay. During the calm before the  storm, I picked up Red-breasted Sapsucker (425) and Yellow-billed Magpie (426) in Sacramento. Then at San Francisco Bay, we didn’t find the overwintering Rock Sandpiper at Heron’s Head Park. However

My mother introduced me to birdwatching before I can even remember. I was an infant at the time, and would not consciously appreciate birds until the age of 7. I grew up birding in Eastern Massachusetts, in the village of Newton Highlands. My mother still lives there, and my family and I decided we needed a trip to Massachusetts to celebrate her 21 st birthday. Yup, you guessed it, she is a Leap Year baby, born on Feb 29, 1936. We planned to fly into Logan International Airport in Boston on March 1 and celebrate her birthday the following night. We would stay through March 6 so I began scheming up ways to add new species for my Biggest Year. Several people had reached out to me (or perhaps I reached out to them) and had offered to help me get around the area looking for rarities, including Jim Nealon of New Hampshire, Mike Greenwald in western Massachusetts, and Alf Wilson in Marblehead on Boston/s North Shore. One recent rarity that I had hoped would stick was the Steller’s Sea Eagle