I began writing this column the night before the snowstorm, not knowing what might happen overnight. Here in the rural area where we live, we sometimes experience power outages due to falling tree limbs, downed lines, etc., but everything stayed okay and I finished in the morning.
By Thursday morning, there were about 9 inches of snow on the ground, four days ahead of winter’s official start. But that wasn’t as bad as it might’ve been or as deep as it was at places farther north. However, any decent accumulation of snow always has birds scrambling for food, and I could see juncos and sparrows out looking even before it got light.
So David went out with birdseed in hand, spread it on the snow, some rocks, and a horizontal stump, and cleaned off feeders. And soon there were more than 100 birds out in view.
The pandemic has made normal activity almost impossible and the snowstorm didn’t help that any. But at least active birds can give you something to look at. And often the appearance of a really unusual species close by or in the state can break mental boredom when it’s most needed.
Recently there have been, and may still be, two vagrant rare birds in Pennsylvania, both of which came from real far away. About 10 days ago, a Northern Wheatear was found on warehouse grounds down Route 61 below Cabela’s in Berks County.
Slightly smaller than a bluebird, this gray and cinnamon colored bird with a white rump breeds from Alaska across extreme northern Canada. This is the area known as the tundra, the treeless plain across arctic and subarctic regions. It feeds mostly on insects, which seems ironic considering it’s now winter, but I guess there are more insects around here now than there are in the tundra.
Wheatears are extremely rare in the Northeast but there have been occasional sightings of them. The other unusual bird, though, is so rare in this area as to be almost bizarre.
Birders are constantly checking out groups of birds even if they’re common species like Canada geese. And, when a birder in Delaware County near Media found what he thought was a rare pink-footed goose, the word quickly went out.
So Jason Horn, who knows more about unusual species than I could ever hope to, went looking for it. But what he found was instead a Bean-Goose, a lookalike species so rare around here that it’s never before been found in Pennsylvania.
These days word of unusual sightings travels at the speed of light through private text messaging and social media. But Jason called me on an old-fashioned telephone so I could report it to PABirds.
I had to look up Bean-Goose to see what it looks like. It hast has orange legs, yellow on its bill, and breeds as far away as the Siberian taiga, the area where the tundra ends.
I wanted to be sure to correct an error I made last week. For reasons I won’t explain, I listed the Bethlehem/Easton Christmas Bird Count date as December 27, but the correct date is Saturday, the 26th. I apologize to long-time friends Don and Elaine Mease, who will tell you how to report what you see if you call them at 610-346-7754.
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December 19, 2020 at 07:58PM
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A sighting of a rare bird species never before found in Pa. | Lehigh Valley Nature Watch - lehighvalleylive.com
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