Category: Birding

On Friday the 6th, Charles Mills spotted a Cassin’s Sparrow on a rural road in extreme southwest Arkansas. Once accepted it will be a first state sighting.   I thought about making a speed run down there but my Friday was full and Saturday was busy too.  Later Karen emailed me to tell me that she and Helen Parker were going Saturday if I was interested.   I had National Astronomy Day on Saturday but when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to beg off the early hours of NAD  and make a run for it.

The best way to get there is to past Texarkana on I-30 and sneak back up on it from the west, taking “only” three hours to get there.  Dennis Braddy had published the GPS coordinates so we drove till the Tom Tom told us to stop and waited.  In about 20 minutes the bird made his appearance, making big flying loops while he sang. This behavior is called “skylarking” and I had never seen it before.  We were all very happy and glad he had arrived. Then, wait a minute, there was another.  We realized there were two birds doing the unique song of a Cassin’s.  We spotted the other and soon saw them both at once in case there was any doubt.  I was able to get pictures of both birds though not together.  I subsequently learned that this small bird, usually no farther east than Dallas was popping up in Louisiana, Illinois, and elsewhere. For reasons not yet know, they’ve made a sudden but probably surge eastward.

After starting on the east side of town, birding the Witt Stephens Nature Center and Allsopp Park, I wound up at Pinnacle Mountain State Park and walked the Rocky Valley Trail. My target was flycatchers, like the Acadian, which I have not encountered yet this year.  As I walked the trail listening to Summer Tanagers, I realized I didn’t remember what Scarlet Tanagers sounded like so I stopped and listened to playback.  A minute later, two Scarlet Tanagers arrived and played in the trees.  One was a juvenile changing from yellow to red plumage.  Also heard were Black-and-White Warbler, Pine Warbler, and Worm-eating Warbler.  As I completed the loop and was nearing the end, I heard a thrush like sound and stopped to listen.  About 50 feet away was a thrush that might have been a Swainson’s Thrush but the more I looked the more I became convinced it was a Gray-cheeked Thrush (they are similar looking).  Not only that but it wasn’t the thrush I heard, that one was farther back.  I used playback again to confirm they were both Gray-cheeked Thrush.  Although I got no flycatchers, the Scarlet Tanager and Gray-cheeked Thrush were good consolation prizes.

Allan Mueller and I met at Camp early Wednesday morning to  go over the survey route that I would use when conducting the IBA surveys I had agreed to do.  It was cool and wet but sunny.  We started at the gun range and visited all of the areas that we knew to have habitat appropriate to Bachman’s Sparrow although they weren’t the only bird of interest for the survey.  It didn’t seem very birdy and certainly the numbers of individuals were not great but when we finished we had 69 species for the morning including 17 warblers and 4 first of year birds for me – Bachman’s Sparrow, Blackburnian Warbler, Blackpoll Warbler, and American Redstart.  In the end, it was well worth the saturated shoes.

The map below shows the locations where Allan and I heard two Bachman’s Sparrows.  I think the road names are incorrect. The first was on the eastern side of a hill whose western side is Skid Tank Hill Road and from which you can see a corner of the nursery pond.  The third point in the upper left is where we encountered many of our 17 species of warbler.