Urban Hawks

I went out to Governors Island on Saturday morning to see watch the Red-tailed Hawk nest. On the ferry ride over I ran into Annie Barry. She was leading two walks for NYC Audubon, as part of the inaugural opening of their house on Governors Island which has a new home, 405 Colonels Road, a few houses north of the Pizza Yard.

I said to Annie that there were reports of an American White Pelican in the harbor, and put up my bins and there was the bird! I was able to follow it as it moved further south for about 45 minutes until it was out of sight.

The bird was originally found by Wes Thompson on Thursday with many birders seeing it on Friday. It appears to be using a large amount of the harbor, often being off of Staten Island. Sightings near Governors Island may be correlated with high tide, but it’s hard to know. Hopefully it says a few more days, so more people can see it.

The southern section of Strawberry fields had a Clay-colored Sparrow on Thursday during the day, just in time for the inaugural “Birds & Brews” series of walks by the Linnaean Society of New York. The series starts after work hours at 5:30 pm and ends up with a drink at an Amsterdam Avenue bar. What a wonderful way to start a new series of walks by having a very rare bird be the first bird seen! There are two more trips planned for this spring. See The Linnaean Society of New York’s website for more details.