Birding the Massachusetts coast for winter specialties including Snowy Owl!

Hi everyone. Welcome back to my 2025 challenge where I'm trying to photograph 250 species of birds in the great state of Massachusetts this year. I'm back at the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, also known as Plum Island today. This was the site of my first video two weeks ago. On that day it was extremely windy, difficult birding conditions. Weather today looks much nicer. The winds are lower, temperatures are not too bad, so for January this looks like it's going to be good weather. No excuses today. When I arrived today the first thing I like to do now when I arrive at a site is to film this intro that you are listening to right now. But I actually saw as I was pulling in someone standing outside their car filming something. So I went over there and there were a couple of northern harriers on the ground. So I got my camera out as fast as I could and when they took off I got some good flight shots of one of them that I'm really happy with. I've only seen him in the back of my camera but let's start out by getting northern harrier on the list. This is the second harrier flying away. Right before I took this video I fired off a bunch of still photos. Fortunately I had set my shutter speed to be a very fast 1 25 hundredth of a second. This resulted in sharp photos that have just a little bit of noise due to the ISO being high. The first two photos have the warm brown color of the field in the background while the second two photos have the darker hills in the distance. I think that both backgrounds work pretty well to set off this beautiful bird. Okay so with that done the next thing I'd like to do is go back in time a little bit and show some of the birds that I haven't had a chance to show yet on the channel in the first two videos. Just a quick comment about that. I don't want anybody to feel like I'm sandbagging and holding back birds. I have at this point photographed a lot more birds than are on the list. I think our list total is now in the low 30s but I probably have 15 or 20 additional birds. But the problem is that you know I do like to show the birds for a little while, say a few things about them. I don't like it to be just bird after bird after bird without anything in between them because I don't think that makes good viewing. And then the other thing is you don't want the videos to get too long. So I'll catch up you know I'll definitely get to the point where I'm struggling to add birds a little later in the year. But of course in the beginning of the year everything is new. So with that said let's start with a really good bird that I got on the list maybe 10 days ago or so that I just haven't had a chance to show. And that is a Lark Sparrow. This Lark Sparrow has been hanging out in exactly the same location which is in Lincoln, Massachusetts just west of Boston. And the bird is always seen in the same thicket. I saw it in this thicket late in December and went back and saw it in the same thicket in January. So really handsome sparrow with that neat pattern on the face and it was good to be able to get some footage of it fairly close up on the ground moving around. So that is a rarity for Massachusetts. Not you know not a crazy rarity but it does trigger the e-bird filters and so that's a good one to get onto the list for this year. Okay another couple birds I want to get onto the list come from the Middlesex Fells area which is actually quite close to my house in the northern suburbs of Boston. So this is a reliable location that I have for winter wren. It's an area where the trail goes down into sort of a wet boggy area with low thickets and the winter wrens just love that habitat in the winter. So I went there with that as the target and I had in the back of my mind that this is also a place where I often see Pileated Woodpeckers. I don't think you can ever have like really a go-to location for Pileated Woodpeckers because they move around over a wide area but when I think about the place I've seen them most often it's definitely this location. So I got there and the winter wren was right where I expected it to be and came out and I got some really nice video of that so that was fantastic so I'll show that now. Wrens are such curious little birds. Once I heard this winter wren vocalizing I just did a little pishing and it came over to investigate. There are actually two wrens and in this clip it's calling to the other one which is farther away. And then as I was just you know sort of finishing up filming this winter wren I hear a Pileated Woodpecker calling not really in the distance but really close. So you know I just finished up with the winter wren and I turned around and I found the Pileated Woodpecker. So I got these two birds pretty much just back to back after walking in on this one. So you know it doesn't always happen that way that you find the two birds you're looking for immediately back to back when you show up at a location but once in a while you get lucky and so this was definitely a nice stop very efficient for these two birds. So as you can see the Pileated Woodpecker was quite close to me. The main challenge I had was to find a little window between the branches to get an unobstructed view of the bird. If you were following my channel last year you might recall that I had an amazing close encounter with a Pileated Woodpecker on my home patch. Here's a little clip of that. This video here isn't nearly that good but it's still a nice look at this spectacular bird. Okay I do have some other birds in my backlog that I would like to get out and show on this video but I think at this point I'm going to start birding here at Plum Island and maybe we'll get to those kind of during the day as we move around. I'm kind of anxious to get birding because the weather looks really nice right now so the first thing I'm going to do is go out to the ocean at lot one and see if I can see any interesting birds floating in close enough to shore to film. Well the ocean was pretty quiet in terms of birds at least close to shore. As always in winter there were plenty of birds farther out but too far away to photograph. In fact I was only able to find one bird that was close enough to film. Fortunately it was a nice one a Red-throated Loon. After walking a few hundred yards down the beach to get the light in the right direction I was able to get some decent footage. This is a new one for the year list. Both Red-throated Loons and Common Loons are common in winter on the ocean and their plumage is pretty similar. Red-throated Loons are much smaller but the size is not really that useful for ID purposes if the bird is swimming around by itself. The best field mark for Red-throated Loon is the way it tilts its bill up at a slight angle which you can see pretty well here. After driving a little way south I came across several birders watching this Barred Owl. A nice close look, good lighting, there's just one small thing missing from this shot which I'm sure you've already noticed. The owl flew down to the ground without ever turning its head and then reappeared a few seconds later on a farther perch. It's a little unusual for a perches in full daylight like this. This is probably the same owl I photographed during my last visit to Plum Island. Okay, I've been birding for about an hour and a half now, picked up the Red-throated Loon at the ocean, haven't seen too many birds overall. It is nice to be out on a day where you're not fighting the elements quite so much but I'd rather have a few more birds as well. Did see Barred Owl again. So far seems like I'm going to get one of those in every video but the lower road where it turns from pavement into gravel is closed today. Didn't really expect that. I'm not really sure why they did that. It's nicely packed, snow, looks like it would be very easy to drive on but they did. So I've walked a distance of maybe a mile and a half past the gate along the road. That's actually kind of pleasant to be out walking with no cars there but not seeing all that many birds. So I'm going to check this ocean here. I think I'm at lot five or six or something like that, take another look at the ocean, then walk back and bird the Hellcat area some more and see if I can pick anything up. But having fun at least. I saw this overwintering Robin eating berries. Nice to see but that's already on the year list. Then as I was walking back this White-throated Sparrow popped up right next to me. They are very common in winter in Massachusetts but I hadn't photographed one yet this year. Only the second new year bird for the list today so I was happy to see it. So as I'm walking back towards Hellcat on this snowy road, I thought maybe this would be a good time to go back and introduce some more of the species that I've already photographed. So I want to go to another location. This is an urban location in Boston on the waterfront called Castle Island and it's a place I'd never visited before but I've been there a couple of times this year already. I've been going to try to find a specific bird which is a Barrow's Golden Eye that has been seen there. I was not able to see it either of the times that I visited but I did get some other nice birds while I was there. So I'm going to roll some of that footage now and we'll see what I saw at that location. Somewhat unusually for an urban birding location there's plenty of free parking here. This area here is called Pleasure Bay and it's completely enclosed by a breakwater which is why it's so calm. It's considered part of the same birding hotspot as Castle Island. Just after leaving my car during my first visit of 2025, I heard a soft warbling sound coming from up in a tree and I was surprised to see this group of snow buntings. I had never seen snow buntings in a tree before. They're usually on the ground or in low perches, probably because they spend a lot of their time in the arctic where there are no trees. One of my targets here at Castle Island was this flock of about 100 Dunlin which have been reported regularly on eBird all winter long, hanging around on the rocky shoreline near the entrance to Pleasure Bay. I was also able to get some footage of the Dunlin flock in flight. I always enjoy watching flocks of shorebirds flying in tight formation like this. It's challenging to video them however since the way they zig and zag seems to be done purposefully to throw off a photographer. While I was looking for the Dunlin, I also came across another shorebird species, Purple Sandpiper. They're always found on rocks right at the edge of the ocean, often feeding in the crashing waves. It seemed a little odd to see them in such calm conditions, but it did make them easy to photograph. So this is species number 42 for my 250 bird challenge, as shown in the upper right of the screen. Purple Sandpiper is also a new bird for the channel life list, which is the number in the lower right. I have a stricter requirement on photo quality for the channel life list than I do for the year list. If I get poor photos or video of a bird, I figure I can always get something better at some point in the future. Since Castle Island is located right in downtown Boston, it's not surprising to see a flock of pigeons here, so let's get them on the year list. Okay, so I've come back up to the northern part of the island. This is the boat launch area. There's a little gravel road that goes out to the river that separates Plum Island from the mainland. This can sometimes be a nice place to see a few birds in the water, but right now the tide looks pretty high, the water is flowing there, and not too many birds around. So overall today I haven't seen all that many birds, but I just did pick up a really nice bird, which is a Snowy Owl. So I stopped at the area that is usually called the wardens or the maintenance area, and some people had found this in their scope, and a very great find by them, because this was a very distant bird. I'll put the photos up here. So unfortunately, not a great look because of the distance, but I have made the decision that I'm going to count everything that I photograph as long as you can tell what the bird is, and so I think we're just within the margins of that rule with this Snowy Owl. So I am going to count that, and it's a nice one to get on the list. It's been probably four or five years since I've seen a Snowy Owl. I'll have to check. So that kind of wraps up my birding for today here at Plum Island. I'm not sure if I'm going to keep putting more birds into the video or not. I'm going to have to see how the timing is. I think I probably will have some time for that, so stay tuned, and we will add some more birds possibly from my home patch. Okay, it's a few days later, and I would like to add a few more of the birds that I've already photographed in 2025. So on Sunday, which was the day after I went to Plum Island, I did go out birding again and actually picked up some really nice new species for the year list, but I'm going to save that for the next video. Then on Sunday night, we did have about eight inches of nice powdery snow come down on the Boston area. So on Monday, which was a holiday, I stayed local and I went to the Horn Pond Recreation Area, which is my home patch. It was a real winter wonderland with the fresh snow on the branches and bright sunshine. I saw this tufted titmouse feeding on some seed that someone had left, and I was able to get some good close-up footage. The common seed-eating birds at Horn Pond tend to be quite tame because people feed them regularly. In fact, the chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches will actually follow you around hoping for a handout. This American coot was hanging around with some mallards in the creek, which is about the only open water right now. We've had some very cold weather over the past few weeks, and so the main pond and the smaller lagoons are completely frozen over. Now, going back a week or so ago, we had this handsome male northern pintail hanging around at Horn Pond. Most pintails migrate farther south in the winter, but occasionally a few will tough it out through the winter. Ring-billed gull is, of course, a very common species in Massachusetts all year long, so good to get it on the list. We have a small flock of about 10 red-winged blackbirds hanging out at Horn Pond this winter, which is unusual. Normally, I consider the first red-winged blackbird sighting of the year to be the first sign of spring, but not this year as we are definitely still in full-on winter. I couldn't resist doing a little hand-feeding myself to get another couple of common species on the list. This video was taken with my phone. I recently upgraded from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 16. I use my phone for filming myself and for whenever I want to take a wide-angle shot of something, so hopefully the quality will now be a little bit better. What I'm enjoying most right now with my new phone is not having my battery die on me all the time. All right, that's a wrap for this video, but I'll be back next week with another new episode of my Massachusetts 250 Bird Challenge. Right now, I am trying to keep to a regular posting schedule of putting out a new video every Friday afternoon. Thanks very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.