Finding rare birds in Massachusetts for my 250 bird challenge!

Hi everyone. I'm back with another video in my 2025 challenge to photograph 250 birds in the state of Massachusetts. So I'm back at Cape Ann, which is a place I've already visited this year, but it's a great place for winter birding, so I'm looking for some more winter specialties. I'm going to be birding some areas that I didn't bird at the last time I was here. So I started out today by birding a place called Niles Pond and also Brace Cove. So these kind of go together. The Brace Cove is on the ocean, so it's saltwater. And then Niles Pond is actually a freshwater pond, which comes right up against the ocean. And it's a well-known spot for finding overwintering ducks and other things. And in particular, there's been a lot of reports of some overwintering American pippets there, so I wanted to try to get those as well. So when I arrived at Niles Pond, the pond was mostly frozen over, but there was just one area of open water, and of course the ducks were all concentrated into that area. So I spent a little time scoping that area out and seeing what I could see. There were plenty of ring-necked ducks in there. That's a common duck in the wintertime, but it's not one we have on the list yet, so I think I'm going to add that. Then I noticed that there were also some scop out there. They were sleeping with their heads tucked in, and it took me a little while to get some with their heads up so that I could identify them. I think that they are all greater scop, but there's a possibility that there might be at least one lesser scop out there, so I'm going to have to check my photos, but I know that we're going to be able to add greater scop to the list as well. So in this clip, you can see a few scop that are awake with their heads up. There's one male and a couple of females. The male scop in the center of the screen right now is a greater scop. It can be ID'd mostly because of the shape of the head, which is wider than it is tall, and the peak is towards the front of the head. I was not able to find any lesser scop in this pond that I could confidently identify, so getting lesser scop on the list is going to have to wait for another day. So after checking out the freshwater of Niles Pond, I headed over to this little causeway which separates the freshwater from the saltwater and looked for some more species there. So one bird that showed up right away was an overwintering killdeer. That's actually a very unusual bird to find in winter, but this guy's toughing it out and he had been reported there, so I wasn't too surprised. So getting killdeer on the list a lot earlier than I expected in the year. This beach is covered with a thick layer of seaweed, which seems to be providing food to overwintering birds. A real target that I had here were some American pippets that have been reported. They've been kind of seen ever since last December. I hadn't seen any real recent reports of them, but I was still hopeful, and sure enough, I did see at least one American pippet. I believe there's actually two, but got some pretty good photos and video of American pippet. I really like watching American pippets walk around. I think it's kind of funny how they constantly wag their tail up and down as they walk. Pippets are not all that common in Massachusetts, and I usually don't see any until late in the fall. It's nice to get this species out of the way in January. Another bird that's present here at Brace Cove, flying back and forth between the pond side and the ocean side, is a little flock of song sparrows. That's a common sparrow, and we'll get that one on the list as well for this trip. Another nice sighting at Brace Cove is this little group of harbor seals sunning themselves just offshore. Harbor seals are quite common along the New England coast. Alright, so after finishing up at Niles Pond and Brace Cove, my next stop was Atlantic Avenue. So this is the road that runs along the eastern edge of Cape Anne along a very rocky ocean shoreline, and this is a well-known spot to see all sorts of overwintering ducks out there. It's also known for seeing alcids, particularly black guillemots, and that's a species I would really like to get onto the list this year. So that was definitely my target. So I just finished walking up and down Atlantic Avenue for about a half an hour, 45 minutes. Saw a lot of birds, saw a flock of purple sandpipers, all three scoters, and other birds like that that are already on the list. I'm not sure if I saw black guillemot well enough to count or not. I did see a few black guillemots out pretty far. I'm having a little trouble even just seeing the pictures in the back of my camera because of all the glare. It's a bright sunny day today, I'm not complaining about that, but I'm going to have to check those photos and see. It may be something like the snowy owl last week where the pictures were poor but good enough to count. I hope so, but they were pretty far out. So here's an uncropped photograph of a black guillemot. Can you see it? If you're watching this video on your phone, you probably can't see anything at all. It's right here. It seems hopeless to try to identify this bird based on this photo, but the amount of detail captured by modern camera sensors is really amazing. Let's zoom in. Now you can actually see what this bird is. Note the white head and neck was just a little dark around the eye, the thin black bill, and the gray back with a white wing patch. Put all that together and that's enough to ID this bird as a black guillemot. Here's another image of the same bird where you can see the bill a little bit better. And this photo is a second black guillemot that I saw facing in the other direction. Okay, I'm going to drive to my next Cape Ann birding location now. While I do that, I'm going to show some video that I took earlier in the week. I made another visit to Castle Island. That's an urban birding location in downtown Boston. And once again, my target there was Barrow's Golden Eye. Let's see how I did. Hi folks, I have come back to Castle Island, which is a nice birding location in Boston. I did show some birds from this location in my last video. I keep coming back to this location because there's a specific bird here that I'm looking for that's been hanging out here and that's a Barrow's Golden Eye. This is much more rare in this area than the common golden eye, which is actually quite common. And unfortunately, I've just missed it every time I've come here. It hasn't been here. It's sort of an off and on bird. So I'm back again for another try. There are another couple of birds that I'm going to be looking for. Last time I was here, there were several common loons here. It was quite windy and I did get some footage, which is okay. But I'm going to try to get some better footage today. If not, the other footage will be okay. So we'll see how we get on. This is a nice birding location. You never know what you're going to find. This is Fort Independence, which was built on Castle Island in 1801. However, there's been some sort of fortification at this location ever since 1632. That's about as old as it gets here in America. I found a little group of purple sandpipers that I showed in my last video. This time I decided to take a few still photos instead of video. I think they came out pretty well. Then I made my way over to the Korean War Memorial, which is located right up against the ocean and which is reported to be the best spot to find the Barrow's Golden Eye. The ocean was quite calm and there were several birds floating out in the distance. So I checked them all out by taking photos and then zooming in and looking at the back of my camera. These are long-tailed ducks. These are red-breasted mergansers. This trio here looks a little more promising. But they're all common golden eye, no barrows. However, common golden eye is actually not on the year list yet, so let's add that. This is some footage from my last visit, which was much windier. This is a female common golden eye here. Also on my last visit, I saw this brant sheltering from the wind right up against the coast. Brant are kind of neat looking geese with the black head and neck with just a little patch of white. They're much smaller than Canada geese. They're fairly common in Massachusetts in winter, always found along the coast because they prefer salt water. On that previous windy visit, I also saw my second red-necked grebe of the winter. Now coming back to the current visit, I had no luck finding the Barrow's Golden Eye, so I decided to head over to this nearby fishing dock because I could see some common loons swimming pretty close to it. The loons were staying reasonably close in and were pretty easy to film with the ocean so calm. These are magnificent birds, even in their drier winter plumage. The common loon was recently declared by the American Birding Association, the ABA, to be their bird of the year for 2025. A well-deserved honor in my opinion. Of course, I was hoping that the Barrow's Golden Eye might be hanging out by the fishing dock today, but I didn't find it here either. When I was done filming the loons, I headed back to the war memorial to take another look for the barrows. I wasn't very optimistic at this point, but when I looked out there, I did see a small dark bird that looked pretty interesting. What do you know, that is the Barrow's Golden Eye. Note the dramatic teardrop-shaped white mark on the face. This bird must have been hanging out really far from shore before and was now getting closer. Fortunately for me, it continued to move in closer and I was able to get some pretty good video. It was a relief to finally see this bird after missing it three times before. Although I have to say, I did see a lot of other good birds here at Castle Island while I kept missing the Barrow's Golden Eye. Here's a comparison with the Common Golden Eye on the left and the Barrow's Golden Eye on the right. You can see the difference in the shape of the white cheek patches. And also, the Barrow's Golden Eye has more black on the back, along with sort of a white piano key pattern. As I headed back to my car, I checked out a few gulls roosting on the floating dock in Pleasure Bay. My good luck continued as pretty much the first gull that I looked at was this immature Glaucus gull. This is a rare gull in Massachusetts and it had been quite a few years since I'd seen one. This Glaucus gull looks a lot like an immature Iceland gull, but it's much larger with a larger and heavier bill. You can see that it's much larger than the herring gulls around it, whereas an Iceland gull would be slightly smaller than a herring gull. I moved around to where I could get a side view of the Glaucus gull by filming through a small opening in a fence. When the bird spreads its wings, you can see that the wings are completely white all the way to the wingtips. What a cool bird. Okay, so I am really excited right now. Not only did I get the Barrow's golden eye, which was quite a relief finally to get that one. It was my fourth try here, once at the end of 2024, and then already the third try this year. Finally got it. It was way out in the distance initially and then it was nice enough to slowly drift in closer, so I got some good footage. But then to see that Glaucus gull on the way out was really incredible. That bird is just as good as the Barrow's golden eye. It's been reported here before, but I don't think it's been seen for over a week. So I had it in the back of my mind maybe to check, but was not thinking to get that one at all. So to get two of them on the same trip just really feels good. So this has been a really great location for me this year. Picked up a lot of great birds here that I've shown in this episode and in the previous one. So pretty excited and I'll keep birding. As I was driving out of the Castle Island parking lot, I picked up one more new bird for the year when I saw several starlings eating crab apples. I like their speckled winter plumage. Okay, I'm back. I have birded a few other places in Cape Ann and worked my way around to the northeastern tip, which is Halibut Point State Park. And I've seen some harlequin ducks just now. I had seen some in some very bad weather and snow in a previous video. I was able to see them in some better light today, so that was kind of nice. And while I was filming the harlequin ducks, a flock of about 60 purple sandpipers showed up, so I was able to get some video of those as well. Unlike the purple sandpipers that I filmed at Castle Island, these purple sandpipers are really in their element, feeding right against the crashing waves. Sometimes they let the wave crash right over the top of them as they feed on the seaweed. I could watch these purple sandpipers feeding in the waves all day. Okay, I'm walking back to my car now. And while I'm doing that, I thought I would show a couple of other birds that I've seen during the past week to 10 days. First one of those is a brown thrasher that has been hanging out at Horn Pond, my home patch. This is the same brown thrasher that I saw this past October on my home patch. At that point, it made a really nice addition to my home patch big year list. The bird then stuck around for the Christmas bird count and has continued to be seen throughout 2025. Brown thrashers have become increasingly scarce in Massachusetts over the past decade or so, it seems. So I feel pretty good getting this one on the list in January. And another bird I want to get on the list now is this Carolina wren, which sat up on a fence post in the community gardens at Horn Pond for me and gave me a nice look. So I'll put that video up here as well. All right, so with those birds added to the list, I think I'm gonna wrap this video up here. But before I go, there's one thing I wanted to mention. When I got up this morning, I noticed that my channel had reached the 1,000 subscriber level. So not a huge deal, but that's kind of a nice milestone to reach. So thank you very much for watching. And if you're one of my 1,000 subscribers, thank you very much for subscribing. And I'll see you in the next one.