Birding
Where I've been/What I've seen
This past week I visited the Hawaiian islands of Maui and Lana'i, two islands in a chain which tourists view as exotic and beautiful. Now, most of these tourists don't realize the cost of this "exoticism" within the islands is, extensive habitat loss, avian malaria, and predation from introduced species (i.e. cats) to the island chain. Hawaii for these reasons, is known as the "bird extinction capital of the world", with 71 species going extinct, and another 24 vanishing since James Cook's "discovery" of the islands. This trip, I tried to focus a bit more on appreciating the native Hawaiian birds which still exist, for they still remain some of the most threatened in the world.
The next morning, I walked over to this “bird-sanctuary” and discovered it to be a Wedge-tailed Shearwater breeding ground. I immediately checked eBird to see if they had been seen there recently, and sure enough, just six days prior there had been eighty or so seen. After a day filled with snorkeling (more to come on that later), I came back just before sunset to try to see them coming back. Unfortunately, it was time for dinner just before when they would usually arrive, so I had to head out just before. It took much convincing of my parents to let me go back there in the dark, but the effort did not go to waste. At least forty of the shearwaters were there by the time I got back there, some sitting only feet away, and others curiously waddling up to me. For how skittish shearwaters like these can be on the ocean, they were indifferent to me right near their burrows. The next day was the main birding day of the trip, so I went back up to the room a little early and slept.
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Hello! Been quite a while since I did my last post (2 months wow, thanks school), and I recently got back from a casual trip to London, so here goes nothing. Despite this trip being mostly for leisure, I still managed to get some birding in, bringing in somewhere around fifty lifers, well above my target species list. Most of my birding around the city was casual and included birds that I mainly saw when doing touristy things.
The next day (Christmas), I woke up to go on an early morning walk (which happened to be 8am) to Kensington Gardens. This was my first time “birding” per say, and the number of birds which I saw was likely reduced due to rain. Here is where I found my lifers Common Pochard and Tufted Duck, probably my two favorites at this location. Also new to me were Egyptian Geese, Eurasian Coot and Moorhen, Rose-ringed Parakeet, and Eurasian Wren, among others. I didn’t really see anything new until the 28th, the day my family had set aside for me to go birding in one of the neighboring counties (which happened to be Hertfordshire) in the Lea Valley. I went out with a local, one of the owners of Birding London, a nice birding tour company that operates in the counties around London. My targets for the day were the few shorebirds around, as well as many of the harder to get passerine birds around the city.
At this next stop we did not pick up very much that was new for the day, however I’ll go over the highlights. We made a few stops at the blinds along a trail where we picked up a Chiffchaff, White (Pied) Wagtail, dipped on Common Kingfisher, but also heard a few Water Rails over in the section of the preserve with reeds.
Unfortunately, I had to go to the airport at this point, concluding a very fun trip, I ended the trip getting around 50 lifers, and several more European subspecies that I would probably not see back in the states.
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