I went to Island Beach SP today with low expectations. I don't know much about the winds, but I do know that SW winds are exactly the opposite of what's needed to produce a migration fallout. I thought maybe though that the winds would discourage whatever birds were already there from leaving. So I wasn't surprised when every trail I walked produced only a handful of species. Of course, I did skip, perversely, Reed's Road. The parking lot had a lot of cars in it and I didn't feel like wearing a mask.
However. Walking back out on the Spizzle Creek trail, where I'd had the most birds of any spot I'd been to, I saw, in the thickets on the side of the trail, a bird with an intensely red breast. My first thought was that it was one of the House Finches I'd seen coming in and that the light was playing tricks on its coloration. Then I thought Purple Finch, but knew that was wrong, then I thought Vermillion Flycatcher and considered that and then the bird up and flew south and I thought that there was an interesting bird I'd just have to let go. By the time I stepped onto the roadway, the bird was out of my mind.
I drove down to the Winter Anchorage, hoping for an exposed sand bar and some shorebirds on it. Coming out the other way were Mike and few other birders I know. One of them shouted out the car window, "Painted Bunting at A20!" Greg had put it on the local alert. Which I don't get because I have socially distanced myself from almost all the alerts but that's another story.
Wait a minute. I was just at A20. That's the parking lot for Spizzle Creek. I raced back up there to find that Greg had seen the bird just minutes after I had left. He started to describe his sighting...he'd first seen a bird a with an intensely red breast in the the thicket across the street, which is just south of the trail head and then it flew into the parking lot where he saw it was a Painted Bunting. It then flew back into the thickets and he couldn't relocate. But in the middle of his story I blurted out, "I saw that F**#ing bird." Painted Bunting never occurred to me when I was running down the list of possibilities because I only saw its breast--the head was just dark in the shadows.
Interestingly, his first reaction was Vermillion Flycatcher too. Somehow our mutual misimpressions confirmed the sighting to me.
7 or 8 of us searched around the area for about an hour. At one point I was standing with another birder peering into the dune when she heard a bird singing and, like a refrigerator turning off, I realized I was also hearing the song. After determining that no one was using playback to attract the bird, we went over to the hedge row where the sound seemed to be coming from. But no Painted Bunting showed up.
So, not the ideal way to get a county and year bird but I've counted lousier looks in my time.
For the record, my Spizzle Creek list:
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