Bird-A-Thon Pictures!

Piping Plover at Plymouth Beach.  Endangered Species.

Bird-a-thon was awesome!  It was insane and exhausting, but also fun and rewarding. Our little team of four netted 52 different bird species. I suspect that is on the low side for really enthusiastic birders, but I thought we did an outstanding job. Tom took all of these pictures, and every one of them is outstanding, too. We even saw Piping Plovers, a lifer for me, I think. They are cute, adorable, and endangered.  (BTW, you should view these pictures LARGE or ORIGINAL size at Flickr.  They are really that good!)

Willet on Plymouth Beach.

Mid-day Saturday was shorebirds at Plymouth Beach. This is a Willet. Willets are large shorebirds, speckled gray-brown with a long straight bill. Willets look quite nondescript on the ground, but once in flight or even with wings spread out, they are distinguished by their striking black-and-white color pattern.

Common Tern in Flight

We saw four different species of terns in Plymouth! Four! This beauty is a Common Tern, which is not at all common as far as I'm concerned.

Laughing Gull, May 15 2010

All four of Massachusetts' gulls were well represented, too. I couldn't resist this shot of a laughing gull.

Marbled Godwit

I wanted a Yellowlegs, but I got a Godwit. I actually failed to see more than a couple of my target species, but seeing a Marbled Godwit in the spring is quite rare, or so I've been told. Pete and I saw this guy on Saturday. A birder from another Bird-A-Thon team gave us the ID and the info on this species. If he hadn't, I'd still be looking through field guides!

More to come later on. Thanks especially to BirdingGirl (my cousin and inspirational fellow blogger!) for joining our Birdathon team and taking us birding in Bridgewater Friday evening!

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