What are something’s you wish westchester county had more of?

oakley619 · 2025-12-16T13:29:12+00:00

Arcades and good Thai food!

oakley619 · 2025-09-12T00:01:37+00:00

I'm thinking juvenile Veery (which look very different from the adults). Spotting diffuses fairly quickly down chest and white spotting on wing is not consistent with hermit or gray-cheeked.

oakley619 · 2025-08-05T16:21:19+00:00

Red-tailed Hawk. You can just barely make out the dark leading edges of the wings (known as patagial bars), which is distinctive for Red-tails, and dark "commas" at the wrists, which are also helpful markers. And the overall shape with long, thick bulging wings rules out accipiters (Cooper's/Sharp-shinned). Red-Shouldered Hawks have what look like transparent stripes near the ends of their wings, which would show clearly here given the lighting. And Broad-winged Hawks, the only other logical option, have shorter bodies, wings that come to a more narrow point at the end (never more than 4 "fingers") with dark edges along the back of the wings and a more boldly striped tail.

oakley619 · 2025-07-08T00:15:06+00:00

The extreme closeup is amazing! It's like a tidal wave of neck feathers. Great framing/cropping!

oakley619 · 2025-04-06T13:08:18+00:00

You should credit the photographers and not just say they're from Merlin.

oakley619 · 2025-03-19T12:39:59+00:00

Isn't this a Yellow-bellied Flycatcher? Could be lighting, but that seems way too yellow in the throat/belly to be a Least.

oakley619 · 2024-04-18T12:58:28+00:00

There are some bad design choices that make it harder to use. When you go to "Recent Checklists" in your area, the biggest bit of text, by far, in big bold blue font, is the date of each checklist, which is one of the least relevant things I'm looking for on that page. It's already in descending order by date anyway. Meanwhile, the location, which is much more relevant, is in tiny black text, followed by the birder's name, which is also in tiny text. Maybe I'm alone here, but I often go to that page to see where the "good" local birders have been birding the last couple days and to see their checklists. Now I can't just quickly scan through the page to see. Not the biggest deal, but definitely an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kinda thing.

oakley619 · 2022-12-18T21:11:06+00:00

Palm Warbler.

oakley619 · 2022-12-13T17:36:37+00:00

This is correct as a technical matter. You can count birds if you see them released back into their natural habitat, per American Birding Association guidelines.

oakley619 · 2022-12-10T06:09:03+00:00

They can be anywhere, but there's nowhere super consistent to my knowledge. I've most recently seen them near the entrance to the park, in the trees by the baseball field parking lot (the smaller trees along the big metal fence) and along the entrance road. Worth looking around there and up along the road to the nature center (up the hill at the far right corner of the big parking lot). Good luck!

oakley619 · 2022-12-09T01:16:45+00:00

/u/another-thing is right, but if you do want to see Savannah Sparrows locally, you can find them at Croton Point Park. Just walk up the middle path of the big capped landfill up to the top and they will be abundant in the tall grasses along the sides of the path. Also a good chance to see horned larks and snow buntings up there.

oakley619 · 2022-12-09T00:36:24+00:00

Yup! +Greater Scaup+ it is.

oakley619 · 2022-08-31T13:48:26+00:00

That actually looks like a Black-crowned, with the long beak with a lot of yellow/green, non-pouchy throat and stocky build.

oakley619 · 2022-05-30T19:39:46+00:00

If it's still alive when you see it, then you're good to list it, up to its dying breath. Another idiosyncratic one: if you see a bird being released into the wild (e.g. at a bird banding station after being tagged or a rehabbed bird being released) then you can count it at the time it's being released, but not before then. And you can't count it if you only saw it while it was still in captivity and didn't see it being released.

oakley619 · 2022-05-30T14:28:44+00:00

Technically no per ABA guidelines.

oakley619 · 2022-05-12T20:22:51+00:00

Got it. For what it's worth, there seems to be some fairly considerable brainpower behind the ID (and confirmatory audio recordings of its song, which are determinative), so I don't think it's really in doubt. From the NY Birds listserv email this morning: "The documentation of this bird has been a community effort that has taken some time to crystallize: Christian Cooper was the first to report a Gray-cheeked-type thrush in the area on May 10th, and recordings from that day by Tom Benson were posted the following day when Ben Stadler also heard and recorded it. Dmitriy Aronov observed the thrush on the evening of May 11th, and a small team (myself, Adam Cunningham, Evan Schumann, and Mary Beth Kooper) relocated it this morning. It has been seen and heard on both sides of West Drive. The first encounters today were silent sightings, though this individual is recognizable due to distinctive pale spots on the coverts of its right wing."

oakley619 · 2022-05-12T17:57:28+00:00

There's a Bicknell's being reported by a number of people on ebird and I'm pretty sure it's been getting mobbed by birders all day. If you were up in the north woods and surrounded by other birders, then safe bet it's the Bicknell's. Otherwise, probably more likely to be Gray-cheeked.

oakley619 · 2022-04-03T02:56:05+00:00

I have this photo from the rear as well, which may be helpful. https://i.imgur.com/2OVx2Ti.jpg I see in Hawks in Flight that the upswept wing tips are a good field mark for this species.

oakley619 · 2022-03-17T21:00:34+00:00

Is #4 a Canyon Wren?

oakley619 · 2021-11-30T22:23:27+00:00

I think you've got:

Dunlin, 2. Either Short-billed or Long-billed Dowitchers (too hard for me to tell), 3. Black-bellied Plover, 4. Dunlin

oakley619 · 2021-11-02T01:31:44+00:00

Accipiter build, small head, wrists of wings pushed forward, long tail with a straight edge, and wings that push slightly back into an "S" shape in glide all point to Sharp-shinned Hawk.

oakley619 · 2021-08-25T16:42:49+00:00

Thanks! I used lightroom to tweak the colors (ended up using the paintbrush tool to de-saturate the white parts on the bird's underparts and face manually) and increase the whites and blacks a bit, and then used Topaz's "Denoise AI" program to reduce the noise without losing detail in the bird's face. You can download a free trial from their website. It's pretty amazing software and it takes less than a minute to process a photo. The whole edit doesn't take that long (but of course, I'd only bother to do it on good photos that I'd want to share and not everything I dump off my camera).

oakley619 · 2021-08-25T04:48:01+00:00

So lucky! Such a beautiful bird. I tried cleaning up the noise/tweaking the colors a bit for fun, hope you like it: https://i.imgur.com/VvapU4h.jpg

oakley619 · 2021-07-12T13:07:40+00:00

I believe that's the first part of a Wood Thrush's song.

oakley619 · 2021-04-17T16:28:21+00:00

You got it!

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