Colliers Mills 4/16--Red-headed Woodpecker, Black-and-white Warbler, Common Yellowthroat

I was standing in the woods at Colliers Mills this morning when I said to myself, "I guess I'm not going to see a Red-headed Woodpecker today...maybe even this year." (I tend to the morose.) This was my third or fourth search this year and I had sincerely given up, as the Second Law of Birding stipulates. Immediately upon muttering that grumble, as if I was uttering a magic spell, I heard a Red-headed Woodpecker giving its "Queer!" call. It sounded as if was 10 or 20 yards directly in front of me, but there is no straight-line walking in those woods with all the fallen tree trunks, so I zig-zagged my way toward the edge of the woods, where the nest has been, only to overshoot the mark because the woodpecker was calling behind me. I turned around and caught a glimpse of it, and then it led me a merry chase, from tree to tree, sometimes in sight, sometimes high in the canopy, until it finally landed on a broken trunk and drummed away while I took photos from a distance. And now I no longer have any interest in that bird until January 1, 2024. 

Witchety-witchety and a squeaky wheel sound were what I went to Colliers Mills for, and I succeeded in tracking down the former (Common Yellowthroat) at the northside of Turnmill Pond, and the latter (Black-and-White Warbler) in a few places in the woods. Easy, abundant warblers, but always a pleasure to get the first ones. 

The most unusual bird I found there today was at the spillway on Turnmill--an American Coot. In some places this would be an unremarkable sighting, but in my previous 325 trips to Colliers Mills I had never seen one. Coots are usually gregarious, so finding just one struck me as odd, though I didn't beat the reeds to see if there were any more secreting themselves. 

The First Law of Birding states that if a guy in a pickup truck asks you if you've seen anything "good" he doesn't care, he just wants to tell you about eagles he has seen. Well, the disease seems to have spread to passenger vehicles, because I had my fourth inane eagle conversation of the year with a guy in a Honda Civic, who was "walking" his 3 dogs along the road at the back pond--they run ahead and he follows in his car, a practice I cannot adequately express my contempt for--it's lazy, irresponsible, and makes the assumption that you and your dogs are the only ones in the woods. Anyway, he stopped and after telling me that they were just stretching their legs (out of the 14 legs involved, 12 of them were), asked me if I had seen anything..."good." I told him I had heard some good thing (I was thinking the yellowthroats). Then he dropped the eagle question. "Not today," I told him. "Oh, I saw one last week, you know there's this pond...(Oh, yeah, he's going to tell me about the geography of Colliers Mills). I cut him off and said, "I know, there's eagles all over the place." 

"Really? I never see them."

"You're not looking." 

"Oh." And then, thankfully, he drove on. 

The woodpecker was the 40th species for the trip, and I decided that was enough and headed back to the car. 

Canada Goose  4
Wood Duck  5
Mourning Dove  8
American Coot  1     
Killdeer  4
Herring Gull  1     Flyover
Double-crested Cormorant  1     Turnmill Pond
Great Blue Heron  1
Turkey Vulture  1
Red-headed Woodpecker  1
Red-bellied Woodpecker  4
Downy Woodpecker  2
Northern Flicker  4
Blue Jay  5
Fish Crow  1
Carolina Chickadee  5
Tufted Titmouse  10
Tree Swallow  2
Red-breasted Nuthatch  2     Heard berm & woods
White-breasted Nuthatch  5
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher  4
Carolina Wren  5
European Starling  5
Brown Thrasher  1
Northern Mockingbird  2
Eastern Bluebird  3
American Robin  11
Chipping Sparrow  5
White-throated Sparrow  2
Savannah Sparrow  2
Song Sparrow  1
Eastern Towhee  15
Red-winged Blackbird  20
Brown-headed Cowbird  4
Black-and-white Warbler  3
Common Yellowthroat  2
Palm Warbler  1
Pine Warbler  5
Yellow-rumped Warbler  1
Northern Cardinal  3