It’s time for a blog update… despite me still being quite
under the weather and despite me not doing much birding the last several days.
However, when a text from another guide comes in saying “Common Rosefinch at
Hutch Cut”, I was out the door in less than a minute. Scott and his group found this female up in the northeast corner
of the island last evening:
The female COMMON ROSEFINCH is not a glorious-looking rarity, true, you basically are
looking for a House Finch.
However, it’s still a really nice Asian vagrant (ABA Code 4) and this particular bird
represents the 7th Pribilof record.
Today I dragged my sick self up into Zap Ravine and to the
quarry. Not much was happening in
the ravine although a flash of movement caught my eye as soon as I dropped down
into the first stretch. I wasn’t
sure what it was or even exactly where it was, it was just a split second
glimpse of movement in my peripheries. Oh well. When I was in the van leaving the ravine about 20
minutes later, Scott called from down the road wondering if I flushed a cuckoo
from the ravine… because there was one right in the road just beyond the seal
blind. Hmmmm.
Anyway, I figured I'd spend a few seconds with this bird
because, you know, it IS a rare vagrant after all despite this season being
rather epic for them around western Alaska:
Some views give it a slight buffy look to the undertail (here we go again). But the
underwing bar just isn’t very “contrasty”. First, a pic giving a slight buffy impression (although not as much as the ORCU we still have around):
But I'd argue that the bar going up the middle of the underwing isn't as contrasting as you would expect on an ORCU:
After that, I explored in the quarry some and found the
continuing COMMON CUCKOO at the end of the upper cut. At least one cuckoo (sometimes two) has been at this location
for the past week:
The island’s BALD EAGLE was hanging out along the lip of the
quarry this morning; something I hadn’t seen yet. To be fair though, it's a big bird and it gets around easily enough:
