If you've been following along, I have added 21 new birds to my life list. This basically means I've seen and identified 21 birds I've never seen before. Here's a recap of what I've seen.
Bethel Birds:
- Long-tailed jaeger - This is the first bird I saw in Bethel. I pointed out the window and shouted, "That's gotta be a jaeger! That's gotta be it!" The law enforcement guys thought I was weird for some reason.
- American tree sparrow
- Common redpoll - These are EVERYWHERE. You could tell when the young ones fledge because its like the bunkhouse was being mobbed by dull little redpolls.
- Lapland longspur - These are GORGEOUS. I was pretty bummed I never got my own picture of one.
- Red-necked phalarope
- Arctic tern
- Bank swallow - How silly is it that I get this lifer in Bethel and NOT on the Sacramento River?
- Northern goshawk - I actually saw this when we launched the float planes, I had just forgotten to write it down.
- Rusty blackbird
- Pine grosbeak - The male we saw was HUGE, way bigger than I expect a grosbeak to be.
Field Birds:
- Yellow wagtail
- Willow ptarmigan - We had one ptarmigan that just hung out around the bunkhouse. There was another that kept scaring me out on a plot
- Bar-tailed godwit - Their call kind of sounds like this guy.
- Emperor goose
- Black scoter - This completes my trifecta of scoters.
- Parasitic jaeger
- Glaucous gull
- Sabine's gull - We all know the story behind these guys.
- Semipalmated sandpiper
- Common eider
- Spectacled eider
- Lesser yellowlegs - The only lifer from the Kwethluk trip. If we hadn't been speeding up river, and if my vision hadn't been slightly screwed up from the migraine, I might have had more.
Arctic Tern reminds me of our song - "It's not a gull, but a tern, tern, tern."
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