Whiting WMA 12/16

I took a walk in the Whiting WMA today and at first it was oddly bereft of birds. Usually I'm not 50 feet into the woods before I've seen or heard the usual suspects: chickadee, titmouse, nuthatch. Today I walked a quarter of a mile before I saw or even heard my first bird.

But of the 12 species I found on my walk to the lake, 4 of them are the kind of birds that make me disproportionately happy. In order they were:

Yellow-rumped Warbler: Coming off the trail through the first meadow, before entering the woods, I heard some squeaks and stopped to look around. After a while I saw the yumper come into view in a pine tree. These are pretty common warblers, but any warbler in winter makes me happy. But the yellow-rump wasn't doing the squeaking I heard.  That was coming from 2

Eastern Bluebirds. To see a bluebird in New York was noteworthy; I'd go a long time between sightings. I still can't get used to how common they are down here and I'm more surprised that they hang around, being only 1 of 3 thrushes that winter over, the other 2 being robins and Hermit Thrushes.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker: Walking along the trail through the woods I heard a tapping in the trees and waited to see whether it was a woodpecker or a nuthatch. A woodpecker with a large beak appeared and my first reaction was that it was a hairy, but the red patch on the throat and the messy gray and white wings showed it to be a yellow-belly. Not really very rare but I like to watch them drill holes in a ring around the tree trunk to get the sap moving. This the bird that everyone who is not a birder says, when they find out that you are a birder, "Do you ever see Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers?" because they think it such a funny name and I say, "Yes, and there are much more interesting names than that. Black-bellied Whistling Duck. Zitting Cisticola." (That last one sounds like it should describe a kind of suppurating wound.)

Brown Creeper: On the way back from the lake, in the 3rd field, where the bluebirds boxes are, I came across an active little pocket of birds, including chickadees (which I didn't hear until after I saw the sapsucker) Downy Woodpeckers, a couple of juncos, a Hermit Thrush, and then, crawling up a tree with a deer stand on it, the creeper. Creepers are listed as common, but because of their cryptic coloration, they can be hard to see so it is always a find for me to spot one. I also like them because they're the only representative of their family, Certhiidae, in the Western Hemisphere. 

In the end, I saw or heard about the usual number of species (12) that I normally see this time of year, but because of the "good" birds, it seemed like a more successful jaunt than usual.

List:
Turkey Vulture  1
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker  1
Downy Woodpecker  2
Blue Jay  2
American Crow  1
Carolina Chickadee  9
White-breasted Nuthatch  2
Brown Creeper  1
Eastern Bluebird  2
Hermit Thrush  1
Yellow-rumped Warbler  1
Dark-eyed Junco  4