New Birds

I saw two new birds this week. It seems lately that new life birds fall into two categories (outside of birding trips anyway since they have their own unique dynamic) and my two birds illustrate the two categories very nicely.

The Target Bird: My first new bird this week was a Sedge Wren. I went looking for it. I planned to see it, I knew where it should, when it should be there, what it looked like and tried to imagine what it sounded like. It was my target. New birds like this can be excited and incredibly frustrating because no matter how much you plan and prepare sometimes you just don't find what you went looking for. This time I did and I was very happy to check another must see in Nebraska bird off my list. After you bird the same area for a long time this usually becomes the only new birds, but not always.

The Accidental Lifer: My second new bird was a Least Tern. I was canoeing with the youth in our ward. We were floating down the Platte river, and on a wimp I took my binoculars. I figure if we were floating down the middle of the Platte maybe I could see a piping plover. (a target bird that has been repeatedly not there when looked for.) But I figured I would be concentrating more on stirring the boat, not tipping over (which I failed at), making sure no one drowns and other leader type responsibility to really look at many birds, which turned out to be the case of course. But when we stopped to play on a sandbar and I had a few minutes before some girls attacked me with water, to look at some birds. I thought they might be plovers since they were so small, but they turn out to be Least Terns. I didn't even realize that you could see Least Terns in Nebraska and was quite surprised and delighted to see them. I think this is my favorite kind of lifer, when you don't plan to see something, don't expect to, and maybe think it isn't even possible when there it is. When I see this kind of lifer I am usually looking for something else, doing something else and sometime don't even have the proper birding equipment, binoculars, books etc. But these are the birds that make the great stories. Stories like the chimney swifts and Angies poorwill. And these birds are the reason us birders never take our eyes of the skies, or trees, or bushes, or tweeting noises, or banks or garbage heaps birds are everywhere and you just never know.