Home | New Egypt 2/1--Pine Warbler & Priming

Two semi-interesting events this first of the month. Second one first: I looked out at one of our suet feeders and saw my first Pine Warbler of the year.  There have been winters when I could not not see a Pine Warbler on the feeder, to the point where I had to tell the eBird reviewer that I was tired of documenting this supposedly rare bird, but this has not been one of those winters. Still, it is no longer listed as "rare" in Ocean County during the cold months. 

The first one was while I was driving around New Egypt, looking for kestrels on the wires along the roads, as I often do in the winter. There's no good reason to do this, since I'm going to see a kestrel eventually in the county, more than likely at Colliers Mills, but I do it anyway. And thus, I was able to demonstrate the psychological concept of "priming." Since I was looking for kestrels, when I saw a bird land atop a pole on Long Swamp Road that wasn't a crow, I pulled off to the shoulder, shot a few pictures through the side window and figured I had my county kestrel. I couldn't really stay there and study the bird in that precarious position, but I was primed for kestrel. It wasn't until I got home and looked at my photographs, that I realized it wasn't a kestrel at all, but a Merlin, which is actually more infrequent in that area than kestrel. If I hadn't been looking for kestrel, I probably would have known immediately that the bird on the pole was a Merlin, but too often we see what we want to see. In this case, inconsequential. But too often, of late, not.