By Josh Emm, SWS Associate Naturalist
Big Year (n): A personal goal to see as many species of birds in a specific area in a calendar year.
I started 2016 not intending to do a “Big Year”, but many rare bird sightings early on quickly propelled me into that insanity. I began January as I always do, with the goal of seeing 100 species of birds in Harford County by the end of the month. In that initial endeavor, I failed: I completed the month of January only having seen 86 different species of birds. I had, however, picked up 1 county life bird and a rare subspecies of sparrow. A county life bird is a species of bird you’ve never seen in that county before, mine was a Long-billed Dowitcher found on January 7th at Swan Harbor Farm. It was also the 2nd ever seen in Harford County and a one-day-belated birthday present to me. The sparrow subspecies was an Oregon Junco which visited a feeder at a private residence for about a week. The Oregon Junco doesn’t count per se to the overall year total but is a nice asterisk to the end of the year list.
February was a slow month, as it usually is birding-wise, but as the month was ending, it became apparent that tens-of-thousands of scaup and Canvasback ducks were staging in the upper bay, waiting for the winds to change to aid in their northbound trek. I seriously enjoy scanning duck and goose flocks for rarities, so the sheer number of ducks on the bay pushed me to keep looking for that one mega-rare bird that I knew had to be there. There were also hundreds of American Wigeon mixed in with the scaup, so I was positive I’d find a Eurasian Wigeon mixed in. Sure enough, On February 27th, my friend Dave Littlepage found an adult male Eurasian Wigeon, which I chased so that I could get my 2nd county life bird of the year. I remember standing next to him saying “Congratulations on finding this bird, but now I’m going to have to find a Tufted Duck here to pay you back.” Sure enough on leap day (yes I actually made the extra day count!) I was scoping the bay from Tydings Park in Havre de Grace with another one of my friends, Matt Hafner, looking for the Eurasian Wigeon, when I found an adult male Tufted Duck mixed in with the enormous raft of scaup and Canvasback! That bird was the 1st ever seen in Harford County and only the 7th ever seen in the state of Maryland! That was the point at which I decided to do a Big Year. I had already accrued 3 very rare county life birds in only the first 2 months of the year and had an overall year list of 106!
By April, spring migration was beginning. One day, while assisting Susquehannock Wildlife Society in preparation for their open house, Scott McDaniel pointed over the ridge and said “there are a couple Bald Eagles getting up in a thermal.” I trained my binoculars upon them and was stunned to find an immature Golden Eagle (another county lifer) in the thermal with a Baldy and a couple Turkey Vultures! Scott was able to get some identifiable photos which he later posted on the Susky Facebook page.
A few days later, during a day with good migration wind early and then strong thunderstorms by midmorning, I started seeing reports of Common Loon fallout (fallout is when migrating birds are forced to put down by inclement weather). I told myself that I was going to find a Red-throated Loon if I was persistent enough, so after work, I started checking all accessible bodies of water I could think of. I worked my way up the Susquehanna River and when I got to the vista at the end of Line Bridge Rd, I indeed found one Red-throated Loon with a flock of 40+ Common Loon! I was on a roll and all through May I picked up most of the commoner migrants and almost all of the local breeding species. I saw my 200th bird species, a Hooded Warbler singing in the rain, on May 11th, a new personal record for least days to 200 in Harford. By the end of the month I had seen 217 species in the county. I was truly on a record pace, but from that point onward, most of the birds I needed to pick up were pretty uncommon or rare.
On July 18th, luck struck again! I was birding Swan Harbor; scoping the bay didn’t reveal much so I decided to check the marsh for shorebirds. There were only a handful of more common sandpipers. As I was leaving, I saw a familiar face, Chris Starling! I approached him and we started chatting. He said he wanted to check the shorebirds in the marsh, so I told him that there wasn’t much but I’d go with him to take another look. I dropped my spotting scope off in my car and we walked back around the marsh. When we arrived where all the sandpipers were, the first bird I had in my bins (short for binoculars) was a very large, very strange looking sandpiper with a heavy bill, odd orange legs, and weird black splotches. I asked Chris, having already decided what species I thought it was, “hey, what’s that weird splotchy sandpiper on the right?” He said “I started on the left…. THAT’S A RUFF!!” Sure enough, it was Harford’s first record of a rare European sandpiper, an adult male Ruff (my 221st species for the year and my 8th county life bird for the year).
Throughout August and September, I had sandpiper fever! I was making regular trips out to Battery Island, which is 3 miles south of Havre de Grace, in a kayak I borrowed from a good friend Colleen Webster. I found many birds that are very rarely seen in Harford county including: Tricolored Heron (5th county record), Sanderling, Western Sandpiper, Baird’s Sandpiper, another Eurasian Wigeon, Buff-breasted Sandpiper (I actually found 2 separate birds, 3rd and 4th county records I believe), another Long-billed Dowitcher (3rd county record), Ruddy Turnstone, Royal Tern, Red Phalarope (3rd county record), and one of my personal favorites, American White Pelican, 3 birds that came to visit Matt Hafner and I while we were birding Battery Island. On September 5th, while birding Susquehanna State Park for migrating warblers, I broke my own personal big year record from 2013, which was 232 species, with a Connecticut Warbler. By early October I had already seen 240 species in Harford and gained an astonishing 16 county life birds! My imagination was running wild with ideas of what birds I would need to see to break the all-time Harford Big Year record set by Rick Blom in 1999 with an insane 255 species!
(Kingbirds were not found in Harford County)
By November I was having a hard time finding new species to add to my list. Luckily, November is “rarity month”, so deemed because many birds which are supposed to occur only in the west or even at times birds only from the south show up randomly in the east. I needed a break from the local birding, so on November 17th, I decided to chase a Gray Kingbird (more-or-less a Caribbean native) that had shown up at Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge the day before. En route, Matt Hafner alerted me that a Tropical Kingbird (native from Mexico south throughout Central and South America) had just been discovered in Peach Bottom, PA (sooooooo close!). Needless to say, I successfully chased both rarities and could very well be the only person to have ever seen and photographed both species in the same day in the Mid-Atlantic!
Eleven days later, just after Thanksgiving, a birding couple from New Jersey, Rob and Lisa Fanning, were visiting the lighthouse in Havre de Grace as a pit stop on their way to Baltimore to watch the Ravens game. While at the Maritime museum, they found Harford’s first county record (Maryland’s 7th state record) Black-throated Gray Warbler, but they had left their camera at home and the bird needed to be properly documented! They didn’t know anyone locally, so they pulled some New Jersey strings to get a hold of some Marylanders who quickly got the word out via Facebook. I arrived less than a half hour afterward but the bird had already disappeared. After a bit of searching, Rob refound the warbler atop a tree after it had called a couple times. Photos were taken and the bird was successfully chased by about 30 birders that day. The next day, it was refound at Tydings Memorial Park in a row of 4 cedars and it was established later that day and in subsequent days, that the warbler appears to roost somewhere near those cedars, forages there briefly in the morning, and then leaves to forage over the surrounding few blocks in town, where it can be quite difficult to find. Happily though, up until today (1/6/2017) it is still being seen in Havre de Grace and appears to be very active and healthy. Hopefully it will successfully winter here and return to its breeding grounds to raise a healthy family.
On December 5th, I found my 250th bird species for the year, Snow Buntings on Battery Island. By this point I was grinding hard, pushing to find those last few birds to fill out my year list. December 8th had Harford’s 5th county record of Ross’s Goose (5 individuals!) found by Dave Littlepage in a field off Price Rd. And then nothing. I couldn’t find anything new no matter how hard I tried. Luckily, around December 20th I had several friends telling me about thousands upon thousands of Canada Geese in the Forest Hill/Hickory area. On the 22nd I found an adult Greater White-fronted Goose on a pond in Forest Hill and the next day my girlfriend found a Ross’s Goose (6th county record) off Sandy Hook Rd (on her way home from work), which we successfully relocated off Rt1 in Hickory the next day.
December 31st. The last day of my Big Year and the date set for the Rock Run Christmas Bird Count in Harford and Cecil counties. I was sitting at 252 species thinking about which 3 species I would need to find just to tie the old record. Around 1 in the morning, I decided that I should look for owls for the bird count. I entered Susquehanna State Park and drove for miles, stopping every so often to play recordings of owls, hoping to hear a response. After about an hour of fruitlessness, I came upon a scrubby area and decided to play tape for Northern Saw-whet Owl. I immediately got a response from a distant Barred Owl and then started hearing the tell-tale screams of the Saw-whet! I followed its voice and got relatively close, although never found it. I used my phone to record not only its scream calls but also the short burst of tooting calls it made (a very seldom heard call in winter)! Afterwards, I called it a night, happy to have collected my 253rd species for the year (also my astonishing 20th county life bird to bring my overall Harford life list to 282 bird species). I spent the rest of the day birding Havre de Grace with Matt and my girlfriend for the Christmas Bird Count. We didn’t find anything new for my year list, but had a great time counting birds!
Now it’s 2017 and I’m definitely NOT doing another Harford Big Year, although I’ve already seen some pretty rare birds in only the first 5 days including the continuing Black-throated Gray Warbler, a Greater White-fronted Goose found by Dennis Kirkwood on Turney’s pond in Jarrettsville, the Swan Harbor Black-capped Chickadees, and an Orange-crowned Warbler that’s also been at Swan Harbor since I found it on November 19th of last year. What’s next though? I’m not entirely sure… I will continue to look for county life birds like Pink-footed Goose or Seaside Sparrow since I’ll never have “the complete list of all the birds ever seen in Harford County”, but it sure is fun to try!
