Cowbird Hunt
A trip to Leslie St Spit on the hunt for some common but elusive birds.
EPISODE NOTES
TRANSCRIPT
This past weekend I was up before the sun and on a mission to Tommy Thompson Park. I was on the hunt for brown-headed cowbirds who I needed a little bit of footage of for an episode but so far they’d proved pretty elusive.
By the time I’d gotten to the park the sun was just starting to rise but groups of double-crested cormorants were already heading out from their nests to hunt. There was this magic moment where the sun was coming up and the full moon was still visible on the other side, and I kept trying to set up a shot of a bird passing right in front of it but the birds were being very uncooperative…
And then, hiking to some possible sites for the brown-headed cowbirds I caught a tussock moth caterpillar on the underside of a milkweed leaf. Milkweeds are usually associated most with monarch butterflies but these guys, also known as ‘tiger milkweed moth caterpillars’, are just as attached to them.
After that, I overheard two great egrets fighting over squatters rights in a little pond. By the time I got there the loser had retreated into a tree. Egrets are kinda weird that way. They live in tightly packed colonies but they’re still aggressively territorial with each other.
Anyway, long story short, did I get the brown-headed cowbirds I was there for? No I did not. I saw american goldfinches, juvenile robins I half mistook for thrushes, some adult robins bathing, eastern kingbirds, a cedar waxwing, a great blue heron in a tree… so, not a bad day out but, like… kinda felt like everything but a cowbird. Maybe next time.