The Jersey Birder

One great bird: the Northern harrier

Four birds with “Northern” in their name are regular visitors in my part of New Jersey. The Northern cardinal is ubiquitous at home, and the Northern mockingbird and Northern flicker are regulars in the neighborhood. But the most thrilling of all is the Northern harrier.

To find a harrier, all I need to do is drive two and a half miles to my favorite hot spot, Mercer Meadows, either on the Pole Farm or Reed-Bryan Farm sides. Throughout the year with the exception of the warmest months, you have a fair to excellent chance of seeing at least one harrier swooping over the meadows in search of voles and other prey.

The first one I saw was three years ago in mid-February, and it was my wife who spotted her on the ground on one of the big fields that you approach as you walk into the Pole Farm area from the Cold Soil Road parking lot.

My first harrier photo, from February 2019.

The Gray Ghost soars across a field at the Pole Farm, Jan. 21, 2022. Note the white rump.

Most often, I see the harriers in flight, and they are instantly recognizable by their white rumps contrasting with their darker plumage elsewhere. The harriers often take a break between hunting forays by perching on a tree limb or sitting atop the bird boxes on posts jutting out of the fields.

If you want to see a harrier for yourself, you have a roughly equal chance on either the Pole Farm or Reed Bryan sides of the park. If you have one shot at visiting, I recommend the Pole Farm. The harriers fly during the day, and I’ve seen most of them between sunrise and 10 a.m., and in late afternoon leading into sunset. (I don’t generally go in the middle of the day, because of other commitments and also because the light for photography isn’t as warm as it is at early and late hours.)

Both sides of the park have large fields covered with native grasses most of the year, although at certain points the grasses will be mowed down to promote new growth. Each year there typically are controlled burns on several acres, alternating patches year to year, which also promotes new growth. Grass or no grass, the harriers know they’ll find prey every day.

Most of the harriers I’ve seen at Mercer Meadows are females, but I have caught a few glimpses of the more furtive male, aka “The Gray Ghost.” I’ve only been able to snap a single photo of one, and it doesn’t do the bird justice.

I’ve been visiting the park long enough to know that patterns of the birds vary from season to season, year to year. From November of 2020 through February of 2021, scores of birders and photographers came out to the park in the hour before sunset to observe and take pictures of several harriers cruising over the fields. From last fall to now, only a few photographers come out for harrier shots, if that. Although I’ve seen more than one harrier a few times in recent months, typically I see only one.

But even one is a thrill.

My favorite harrier shot to date, Feb. 21, 2022, at the Pole Farm.

Obsessive and competitive: ‘The Big Year’ birding movie

My Amazon Fire Stick must be figuring me out because its “movies you might like” prompts alerted me to “The Big Year,” a 2011 comedy about a trio of birders who obsessively pursue as many sightings as possible.

Appropriately, the odious villain — Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson) — is a Jersey guy.

As the movie opens, Bostick frets that his record of 732 sightings will be challenged and broken by somebody else. He and his wife are trying to conceive a child, and Bostick repeatedly disappoints her by dashing out of their Montclair home every time a rare bird is sighted or a major storm brings an abundance of birds to a particular area, including a landfill in Texas.

Stu Preissler (Steve Martin) is a New York executive who can’t quite fully cut the cord to the company he runs any more than he can resist the urge to pursue a bigger bird count. In contrast to Bostick, he is devoted to his wife, who accepts and supports his incessant travel to find birds.

Brad Harris (Jack Black) is a financially challenged birder at odds with his father who decides he’s the one who’s going to overtake Bostick as the best birder in North America.

The three men each set off on a “Big Year” quest and soon enough encounter one another on the trail. Bostick and Preissler converge over a garden gnome in British Columbia in pursuit of a rare hummingbird. Harris (for whom Black nicely tones down his manic portrayals of the obsessed) enters the fray and is the first to confide, over dinner and drinks with Preissler, that he is indeed pursuing a “big year.” Bostick and Preissler play coy about their intentions but eventually reveal them.

How these three bird-obsessed men manage to finance their travels (even the wealthy Preissler) requires a bit of suspension of reality. But once you buy into it, the game is afoot and believable for an hour and 40 minutes.

The movie takes birder obsessions to extremes but there are some underpinnings of realism, at least as I’ve known in my birder development.

In one scene, a colleague doesn’t understand Preissler’s devotion to “bird watching.” Preissler replies tartly that it’s not “bird-watching” but “birding,” an active pursuit. In another scene, a British birder notes how only the Americans could turn birding into a competition.

I’d be lying if I said there’s no competitive aspect to my birding. I check to see my ranking at the hot spots and hope to move up, not so much to compete as to demonstrate that I’m gaining knowledge and experience. But that’s a mere fraction of my pursuit, which is based on a love of birds and other wild creatures and on the enjoyment of learning from and with others as we take in the natural world.

Maybe I’ll formally pursue a “big year” when I retire, but I don’t expect I’ll be flying to the Aleutian Islands or pursuing a hawk by helicopter in the Ruby Mountains of Nevada, as the characters in the movie do.

To me, every year is a big year, in its own small way.

Birding down the shore at Barnegat Lighthouse State Park

As I watch the snow fall out my window at home today, I am still glowing over the trip yesterday to Barnegat Lighthouse State Park at the New Jersey shore. My friend and colleague Laura and I had been plotting to hit the coast for a look at shorebirds, and when both of us had meetings canceled Friday, we seized the opportunity. I was hoping to see new birds, and Laura was hoping for Harlequin ducks.

In contrast to today’s wintry conditions, yesterday’s weather was sunny and flirting with warm. A short walk from the car past the lighthouse brought us onto a long concrete jetty, and we instantly had plenty of birds capturing our attention.

Several dozen long-tailed ducks were floating and diving in all directions a short way out in the water. I was so busy getting photos of them and red-breasted mergansers that I overlooked getting shots of a couple of red-throated loons. No matter — I added all three species to my life list.

Long-tailed duck, with the tail trailing in the water.

A few herring gulls flew by as we worked our way across the jetty, and at one point Laura hustled back to her car to retrieve her spotting scope. We used it to zoom in on individual birds and to see across the bay to the spit of dunes at the end of Island Beach State Park.

The scope came in handy as it helped us figure out that the intriguing black and white bird off shore was not a murre (there had been recent sightings) but a razorbill.

Look at that gnarly beak! A razorbill floats in Barnegat Bay.

We encountered a few other birders on the path, including an Audubon guide Laura knew from previous tours. We soon learned that Harlequins were swimming and sunning themselves along the boulders that extended the jetty to the bay’s edge.

We were able to see them (my first!) from afar with our binoculars, and we boulder-hopped to get a closer view. It turned out there were five, and we were careful not to spook them by coming too close. You can see them in action in the 15-second video below.

The Harlequin male is one of the most exquisite birds on the planet.

Farther down the line Laura spotted a sparrow, and I was able to get a few good photos of it. I was guessing song sparrow, but Laura was skeptical. Another birder came by and said authoritatively that it was a Savannah sparrow, a regular visitor at the park at this time of year.

I was puzzled that the bird didn’t have the usual Savannah streaks of yellow. Later in the day I determined the reason was that this was the Ipswich variety of the Savannah common to the Atlantic coast, not the standard Savannah common in the fields near home.

Laura and I spent a good portion of our walk trying to figure the different markings between the red-throated loons and the common loons, which we also saw. The IDs are trickier when the birds aren’t in their breeding coats. I did manage to catch with my camera a few of the common loons, one of which dove for a crab snack.

My ID vote is common loon for this bird, and no guess on the variety of crab on the menu.

We walked back toward the parking lot on the sand and from a distance observed a large flock of gulls milling about a stretch of water that amounted to an inland pond. Through the scope we could make out a good number of great black-backed gulls, another official first for me, mixed in with herring gulls.

A couple of brants gave us a fly-by as we finished the return walk on the concrete walkway. A single female Harlequin, with the distinct white beauty mark on her cheek, swam by. We even spotted a few song sparrows flitting at the base of the lighthouse, and a warbler — maybe a yellow-rumped — made a furtive appearance in the pines at the edge of the parking lot.

All in all, we had a 1.5 mile meander over two and a half hours and logged 11 species and 209 individual birds. I added seven lifers, and Laura got to see six Harlequins — just ducky!

View of the lighthouse from the sand. The jetty is off to the right, out of view, and the big gathering of gulls was off to the left, also out of view. Look closely and you’ll see a gull just to the right of the tower.

Who are those guys? Lessons from the backyard bird count

The Great Backyard Bird Count was on last weekend, and I did my part, logging all the familiar birds that visit regularly. But there was one trickster in the mix, and it took me a while to figure out that this particular bird breed had fooled me once again.

On Sunday morning, I logged in to the eBird app to record whatever flew into our yard and I spotted on the ground below the main tube feeder what appeared to be an oversized sparrow. The bird was a drab gray for the most part, and I reached for my binoculars to get a better look.

The beak appeared average in size and didn’t give me any hints, but the head had a slight wash of brown. That should have steered me toward enlightenment, but I was oblivious to what would ultimately seem obvious.

The bird was busy munching the seeds that dropped from the feeder, and I had time to fetch my camera and zoom in. The bird flew up to the feeder for a time, and I soon had a decent assortment of shots that I’d bring up on my laptop.

Even with the images on the screen, I was buffaloed over the ID. I moved the three clearest shots into my Apple photos app and pulled them up in the Merlin app.

You could have knocked me over with a feather: it was a brown-headed cowbird, most likely a juvenile male. It gave me a bit of solace that Merlin listed the bird as uncommon for this area at this time of year, although I had spotted at least one amid a horde of grackles a few weeks ago.

As I mentioned, this was not the first time I was stumped by a cowbird. At our prior residence about two miles away, I was bedeviled for a couple of weeks by the inability to ID a female cowbird visiting the feeder. I don’t know how many variations of “gray bird that looks like a large sparrow” I typed into Google or how much time I spent in a bird book trying to find the proper ID.

Eventually I figured it out.

In an odd way that long process of frustrated and eventually fulfilled curiosity heightened my interest in birding. Needing to know the answer to “what bird is that?” is my own version of Butch Cassidy looking into the distance at his pursuers and asking aloud, “Who are those guys?”

Harbinger of Spring: morning birdsong

With 37 days of winter remaining yesterday, it didn’t strike me at first when I went out to fill the bird bath, but morning birdsong is back!

Robins and finches (not to mention a squawking blue jay) were making their presence heard in my yard. I didn’t really clue into the return of the morning melodies until I was waiting for my bus to work. From high up in a tree across the street emanated the sweet voice of a song sparrow. Not just chips and cheeps: a full-throated aria was soaring over the rumble of the cars and trucks traveling U.S. 206.

Morning birdsong is a sure sign that Spring is coming, even if it is more than a month until the vernal equinox.

We first paid serious attention to early morning bird songs two decades ago when we lived in Summit, which is about an hour’s drive north of where we live now. With at least one bedroom window open, we’d awaken to the symphony (or was it cacophony?) of the “Jersey birds.”

Living in the Princeton area, we hear more birds each morning as winter transitions into spring. The birds were plenty active again this morning. From the breakfast table, we looked out the window to see two red-tailed hawks sail through the yard in quick succession. The first targeted a squirrel, who tucked into a safe spot behind a tree trunk and, after the second hawk passed, scampered over to another tree and headed toward the safety of his drey.

We are not entirely without birdsong during the dead of winter. The Carolina wrens make sure of that, alerting us each morning with their piercing song that they are masters of the territory and that we are mere tenants.

I shot this photo of a song sparrow through a window after a recent snowfall. I imagine he’s looking forward to spring as much as I am.

My little friends, the sparrows

Until I started taking a more serious interest in birding, to me a sparrow meant the ubiquitous house sparrow. A passer domesticus, rarely alone, was always at the feeders when I was a kid growing up in Ohio. Years later, I marveled at how the house sparrows thrived amid the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan, flitting about Rockefeller Center where I worked and making a life in every crack and cranny they could find.

As I began looking more closely at the birds fueling up on and below my home feeder, I noted slightly smaller sparrows with rusty caps that were obviously different than the routine house sparrows that I never gave more than a casual glance. Intrigued, I pulled out one of our bird books and was delighted to find I had identified these warm weather visitors as chipping sparrows.

A chipping sparrow perches on the feeder post in my yard, May 2021.

The chippers were my port of entry into the wider passerine world. In the winter, I noticed the striped helmets of what turned out to be white-throated sparrows pecking at the snow to harvest the seeds that other birds had sloppily cast down from the feeder by our back windows. I didn’t nail down the ID until taking a few photos and zooming in to see the yellow patch at the bills. I can’t explain it, but the white throats that visit the house don’t have much of that yellow coloration, while those in the woods two miles away at the Pole Farm display the yellow easily discernible with the naked eye.

White-throated sparrow at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm.

My birder friend Laura taught me to identify song sparrows that seem marked by a magnetic force pulling in the streaks of their upper breasts into a dot-like mass in the center of their chests. Over this past summer, I started noticing their distinct, charming song that gives them their name.

This white-crowned sparrow paid a visit on May 1, 2020.

One rainy spring day a few years ago, I looked out the window with surprise to see a white-crowned sparrow standing at the edge of our patio. He was just passing through, not to be observed at home again, although I do see his relatives at the Pole Farm from time to time.

One memorable morning I spotted and identified several Savannah sparrows, with their distinctive yellow eye lines, gathered in the grasses near one of the observation decks at the Pole Farm. I have seen many since.

Another morning on a path I spotted a sparrow feeding on the ground and trained my binoculars to find a salmon-colored beak, one of the tell-tale signs of the field sparrow. It took another birder to point out to me later that I’d been hearing field sparrows all along. I had not yet learned their song, which is paced like the speeding-up sound of a Ping Pong ball dropping onto a table.

I don’t have a photo of a grasshopper sparrow, but one of the expert birders I happened upon pointed a few out in a field. I’ve also spotted a few swamp sparrows and I’m proud to report I was able one day to point out a Lincoln’s sparrow, with a pale buff wash on its streaky chest, to other birders.

I’ve also been delighted in recent months to get close to some American tree sparrows, with their rusty caps and bi-colored bills. They are exquisite.

I remain hopeful to spot a vesper sparrow. My Merlin app sound monitor noted one near where I was walking one day, but if I saw him, it didn’t register.

Until this moment while typing this post, I had not totaled the number of sparrow species I’ve spotted. I have to use two hands to count all 11! The vesper would make an even dozen, and there are rarer varieties who come along in these parts.

It’s a revelation to learn that after decades of having taken sparrows for granted, how much my enjoyment of the natural world has increased by sighting so many different varieties. Who knows what wonders await on my next walk in the woods or at what might show up in the yard tomorrow!

The male house sparrow, on whose kind I have spent untold dollars in bird seed for our backyard feeder.

In praise of the not-quite-so-early birder

Most of my morning birding walks are at dawn or even slightly ahead of it, typically a convergence of my believing the birds are most active when they wake up and my needing to get home and get ready for work.

Even on the weekends and especially on Saturdays, I stick to the same early morning schedule, in large part to get home so my wife and I get a chance to run errands together.

This past Saturday, I got a slightly later start, getting out to the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm at the luxuriously late hour of 7:30 a.m. I was there to rendezvous with my birder friend Laura, who although still crazy enough to venture out into 15-degree weather, sensibly suggested that a slight delay after dawn might be in order.

We had fair luck tramping along the paths in the first hour, and one of the highlights was spotting a pair of hermit thrushes in some woods as we moved from the traditional Pole Farm side of the park to the Reed Bryan Farm.

Two hermit thrushes hunker down in tree branches on a cold morning. — A pair of hermit thrushes take shelter from the cold in the woods at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm, Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. After I took off a glove to snap several frames, Laura rescued my icicle fingers by giving me a hand heater.

But it was at 8:30 — a time when I’m typically either fast-walking back to my car or driving home — when things really got interesting. We emerged from the woods and followed the trail past the Reed Bryan observation platform and approached a big clump of trees. Laura was the first to notice the movement and the orange.

Bluebirds?

No.

Robins. Lots of robins. A big robin party! Their orange breasts gleamed brightly in the low-angle sunlight as they flew back and forth among several trees.

Something else, smaller, was in big patch of evergreens. It took us a while to get our binoculars on the quick little creature, and a yellow-rumped warbler revealed itself. We spent probably 10 minutes gawking at those trees, figuring we must have seen at least 30 robins.

A yellow-rumped warbler cocks its head while sitting in tree branches. — A yellow-rumped warbler soaks up a bit of sun in the woods at the Reed Bryan Farm side of Mercer Meadows on Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022.

Pressing on down the trail, we stopped at the next major clump of trees and spotted more yellow-rumped warblers. We got close enough that I was able to get a couple of decent shots

I looked up down the trail to the right and spotted a hawk, near where I’d seen a red-shouldered hawk a few weeks earlier. As we approached, the bird flew off, revealing a red tail.

Also in the area were several bluebirds. We logged eight on eBird but there could well have been more.

An Eastern bluebird perches on a brnach. — Another breath-taking Eastern bluebird.

Laura and I (and her very good boy black Labrador retriever) were excited about our good luck in spotting so many birds, and we got even more excited when she heard the call of a pileated woodpecker. Not long after, she spotted one flying in the distance. I wasn’t able to catch up to that one, but the red-tailed hawk made a flyover and I was able to get my camera up quickly enough to snap one decent shot.

In two hours, we logged 71 birds in 15 species, plus one chickadee that in our cross-over area we enter as black-capped/Carolina. Most of that action came in the second hour. From now on, I may just sleep in or linger a little longer over my coffee before strapping on the bins and my Canon.

A red-tailed hawk soars overhead against a bright blue sky. — A red-tailed hawk flew over us. Note: I do little manipulation of my images other than bringing out the details and cropping; on this one, I did a bit of vignetting to draw more attention to the bird. On the rare occasion I do anything out of the usual like that, I will make note as I have done here.

Setting the year in motion: Birding resolutions for 2022

As I headed into 2021, I was intent on improving my ability to recognize birds by their calls and songs. I’m happy to report that I improved that skill considerably, and I’ll continue my education there. I also realize that I am woefully weak on spotting and identifying waterbirds. In the new year, my top priority will be, ahem, to shore up my knowledge.

For most of my life, “duck” has meant the ubiquitous mallard, a common site in most ponds and lakes I’ve visited. “Goose” has meant the Canada goose. Those fat honkers invade seemingly every golf course I play and occasionally wander into our yard, only to be chased away by my wife blaring into the bullhorn she keeps by the back door.

In December, I made a couple of trips to Abbott Marshlands in Hamilton, New Jersey, hard by the capital city of Trenton. The marshlands include Spring Lake at John A. Roebling Park, so there are plenty of places for ducks and geese and coots and what-have-you to land. I’ll be heading back there regularly and plan to do a feature on the area at some point soon.

A Northern pintail plies its way through the reeds of Abbott Marsh near Trenton, New Jersey, Dec. 4, 2021.

My second-priority resolution for the new year is to get better at catching birds in motion. My best photos so far have generally captured birds perching on branches and grasses. I’m proud of those shots, but I also admire the work of fellow birders who capture birds — especially large raptors — winging their way through the air.

Finally, I’ll look to expand my range outside Mercer County and even outside the state.

Thanks for reading my posts, and have a wonderful new year!

Getting this shot today of an American tree sparrow taking flight from the tall grass at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm is a fair start to meet Resolution No. 2 of catching birds in flight.

The ultimate American bird: The bald eagle

As with many things in my Cleveland upbringing, bald eagles were just another creature in decline during the 1960s and ’70s. As a teenager, I experienced a couple of ghastly fish kills while heading for a day at the beach on the shore of Lake Erie. Every time I’d look at the embarrassingly polluted Cuyahoga River, I knew I was more likely to see a fire erupt than see a fish.

Eagles, in other words, weren’t expected in the skies over sooty northeastern Ohio. I don’t believe I ever knowingly saw a bald eagle until the early 90s, and I had to go to Alaska to find them. On a business trip to Juneau, a colleague drove me to the edge of town, Mendenhall Glacier. There, soaring above the ice sheet, were an astonishing 27 bald eagles by my count.

I had only a pocket camera with me, and I don’t recall putting any eagle photos in my album. But I remember the day well.

Bald eagles, our national bird, have been making an encouraging comeback. I’m happy to report evidence of that. I saw one flying in the distance south of our first home after we moved back to New Jersey eight or nine years ago.

In the nearly six years we’ve lived in our current home, I’ve seen several eagles flying by, including one sailing over our next-door neighbors’ home while I was on a Zoom call from my COVID-year home office.

One morning as I was filling the bird bath, my neighbor asked if by chance the large bird he had seen on the golf course behind our homes could have been a bald eagle. “Could have been,” I said, and at that moment an eagle flew straight over my house and my head, and flew off into the distance toward Princeton.

I’ve not had the good fortune to have my camera at the ready when those close encounters came, here at home or out at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm where I spend a lot of my free time and have had a couple of flyovers.

Two bald eagles atop a cell tower, January 2021.

The first photo I managed to get was of a pair of bald eagles perched atop a cellphone tower along Business Route 1, just south of where it feeds traffic back into regular U.S. 1 in Lawrence Township. My wife spotted one of them and insisted we turn around (no small thing in New Jersey, the jughandle state!). It was worth the effort, even if my modest telephoto lens could only get a few distant shots.

Some weeks later at the end of March, I was fortunate to capture an eagle in flight at Colonial Lake, a bit south of the cell tower where I’d spotted the previous birds.

A bald eagle soars above Colonial Lake in Lawrence Township on March 31, 2021.

My best shot, so to speak, came last weekend, when I trudged through Abbott Marshlands, a conservation area that hugs the Delaware River near Trenton. I’d been out on the trails for about 90 minutes with only a few distant frames of ducks in my camera and I was nearly back to the parking lot when I spotted a big bird flapping its wings over the marsh. Figuring it was a bald eagle, I silently said “To heck with the binoculars” and raised my camera.

Here’s the best frame of the bald eagle from near the parking lot at Abbott Marshlands.

The bird was too quick for me to get a decent airborne shot. It landed high in a tree across the marsh. I got some fair distant shots but nothing special. I waited for 10 minutes or so, hoping for a closer look, before deciding to head home.

The park is on a turnoff from where Sewell Avenue dead-ends at a bluff overlooking the marsh. As I drove up out of the park, I stopped my car as I entered Sewell and got out.

My luck held: the eagle was still perched in the same spot, and now I had a closer view.

Here’s the best shot I got of the eagle, oddly enough from the end of Sewell Avenue and not in the Abbott Marshalands just below me.

I’m still in the hunt for better eagle photos, and I should point out that the eagles mentioned in this post so far were all mature birds with the dramatic white heads atop black bodies. I have spotted a few immature bald eagles near Mercer Lake at Mercer County Park, a great gathering spot for bald eagles during the winter. With my new longer lens, I’ll be heading back out there once the colder weather comes.

I’m thrilled that bald eagles are no longer considered endangered or threatened, but I still note that their habitat is forever under assault by the relentless encroachment of human development. May they continue to thrive here in my little corner of the Garden State, up and down the Delaware River Valley, and from sea to shining sea.

Hope for the future: An immature bald eagle soars over Mercer Lake.

Giving Thanks for a New Bird: The American Tree Sparrow

The only thing that can top the thrill of spotting a new bird for your life list is knowing that you have a nice image of that bird saved on your camera.

I was on the way back to my car about 8:30 this morning along one of my regular routes at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm when I spotted a small bird on the ground just ahead of me. The bird quickly popped into a small tree beside the path, and I walked gingerly ahead to get the sun behind my back. When I turned around, I spotted it — a sparrow for sure — in the middle of the tree.

This was my first shot of the American tree sparrow, which nicely shows of its bi-colored beak.

My usual procedure is bring up the binoculars first to get the best chance at identifying the bird, then hope it sticks around long enough for me to get a photo or two. This time, however, I raised my camera right away and aimed. The bird was nestled in branches, giving my camera’s auto-focus fits but I was virtually certain I was seeing an American tree sparrow.

I snapped one photo, then another, reasonably confident at least one of them would be clear and sharp. I then switched over to manual focus and fumbled for a few seconds before switching back to auto, when the bird flew away.

I brought up that last photo on the screen on the back of my camera, and there it was, fully confirmed: an American tree sparrow, with its rufous cap and unusual bi-colored beak.

I had been for a walk Thanksgiving morning on the Reed Bryan farm side of Mercer Meadows, where another birder kindly pointed out a section of brush where American tree sparrows were cavorting along with some song sparrows. I’m certain I observed at least one of the tree sparrows (my first knowing sighting), but on my camera I only captured the song sparrows.

Today’s tree sparrow sighting was extra special, because I was a bit doubtful about the one Thursday. But there was no doubt about today’s tree sparrow.