Rarity Chase: Thick-billed Vireo

As I had hoped, a new rarity was discovered in Florida during my stay in Puerto Rico. While birding his local patch, Beto Matheus had discovered a vagrant Thick-billed Vireo at Spanish River Park in Boca Raton. The vireo is a stray from the Bahamas. It is very rare in Florida but seems to occur fairly regularly. I was quite pleased to hear that it was refound the next day in the same spot. If I could find it, the Thick-billed Vireo would be a new Biggest Year-Bird and also a Life Bird for me!

Recall that I had not booked my plane ticket from Miami to Denver in order to have flexibility to chase a new bird near Miami. The stars seemed to line up perfectly for the chase. My flight from San Juan was scheduled to arrive just after noon on Saturday, September 30, 2023. Boca Raton is only an hour north of the airport. My next trip (a road trip to Phoenix) was scheduled to depart Colorado on Sunday afternoon, so I booked a connecting flight for 6:00 AM on Sunday from Miami to Denver. I would have the entire afternoon available for chasing a new bird. I thought, “One afternoon should be adequate for finding this vireo.” Right? 


Wrong! First, the flight from San Juan departed two hours late. Then the sales manager at Dollar Car Rental insisted that I wait thirty minutes before being attended because I reserved my vehicle through a third party. “If you just booked through a third party, then the vehicle is not yet ready for you. Please wait over there.”  And finally (and most importantly), when I arrived at the park with thirty minutes of daylight to spare, the heavens decided that that moment in time and space was the best time to drop several inches of rainfall. I donned my rain parka, but I still became soaking wet within minutes of getting out of the car. And the storm clouds were so thick that no ray of sunlight could get through. It was hopeless. So I returned to the airport quite displeased with the turn of events. 


I returned the rental at 4:45 AM and then realized that I had forgotten to save the Frontier Airlines Confirmation Number when I made the reservation. Without this, I could not check in for the flight by 5:15  AM as required. There was only one thing I could do, which was make a new reservation for the next available flight, at 6 AM the following morning. Now with 24 hours to kill, I knew what I had to do. I made a new reservation for the rental vehicle and was at the vireo spot by just after sunrise. 


Several other birders were already there. The vireo made us all wait a couple hours before eventually appearing in its customary fig tree. The Thick-billed Vireo was Biggest Year-Bird number 758.  

Comments

  1. BetoNovember 28, 2023 at 5:31 AM

    My modest contribution to your Big Year. Best of luck on the home stretch!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Year in Review

Back at home I checked my 2023 list totals on a spreadsheet on my laptop. I had missed a few species. My total was 891 species for the USA and Territories, 9 species short of my goal of 900. I noticed that my World life list in eBird had increased by 111 species. Eleven of these I had seen previously but had never been included on any checklist I submitted to eBird before 2023. So 100 species were true life birds for me. I assessed the value added by visiting each of the outlying regions beyond the Lower 48 states (see Table 1). All the regions were valuable. Within the lower 48 states, I visited Texas the most (7 times) followed by Florida (6 times), California (5 times) and Arizona (4 times). Table 1. Value added (in terms of year birds and life birds) among the outlying regions visited in 2023.  Region     Birding Days Year-Birds Life-Birds  Alaska              14                 ...
Read more

Last Stand in Texas

With three days to go in the ABA Area Big Year competition, I was still in fourth place, and still six birds behind Gino Ellison who was still picking up species in Arizona and California. Nonetheless I would try to maximize my species number, and photograph species that I had not yet photographed. There were four vagrants on winter territories in the lower Rio Grande Valley that I needed to see for my year list: Gray-collared Becard in Brownsville, Crimson-collared Grosbeak in Weslaco, Bare-throated Tiger-Heron and Mottled Owl at Santa Margarita Ranch near Roma, Texas. My friend EJ Raynor was already in Brownsville when I arrived in San Antonio close to 1 AM on Friday, December 29, 2023. I figured I would rent a car at the airport, find a cheap hotel, then drive four hours to Weslaco for the grosbeak and meet EJ in Brownsville at the end of the day. The following evening we had reserved a guided hike at Santa Margarita Ranch in hopes of hearing nocturnal species, including a res...
Read more

My Credentials

Image
You might be wondering, Who is Nicholas Komar? And why does he think he can be the first to observe 900 species in the US and its territories? I became a birder 50 years ago, when I was 7 years old. My twin brother (Oliver) and I were introduced to birds in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, by our birdwatching parents. Birders and birdwatchers are not the same thing. Birdwatchers appreciate birds as part of nature. Birders are birdwatchers who are driven to see as many birds as possible and learn as much as they can about birds. Many birders are competitive. Birders often keep meticulous lists of bird species found in certain geographic regions. Life lists, day lists, county lists, state lists, etc. Young birders like me and my brother often become ornithologists, and that is what we did. My path to becoming an ornithologist was indirect. Before graduating from Newton South High School, I applied to Cornell University where many aspiring ornithologists study. However, my B-leve...
Read more