Today, thanks to the excellent birding skills of Jacob Drucker which were followed up on by Anders Peltomaa, many NYC birders got to enjoy a flock of Red Crossbills in Central Park.  The light made photographing them tough, but it was enjoyable to watch them.  The Red Crossbills are a new bird for my life list.

The video has regular and slow motion clips of the Red Crossbills extracting seeds for cones. The Red Crossbills were identified as the Type 3 subspecies using recordings made by Anders Peltomaa, by Matthew Young and Andrew Farnsworth, the flight-call-wizards of Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  This subspecies specializes in smaller and softer cones from trees such as Spruce, Fir and Hemlock.

Over the weekend, I relaxed an hour outside of New York City as a guest of friends with a house on Long Island Sound.  They had a wonderfully vocal sparrow that reminded me how the simplest of birds can be fascinating if you take the time to study them.

Kentucky Warblers are rare in New York City, and their skulking habits make them that much harder to find.  The excellent birders of Central Park have been keeping track of one for three days near the Swedish Cottage.

I was fortunate to see the Kentucky Warbler twice today.  I didn’t get any great photographs, but was able to capture enough detail to prove I had seen it!  It was a life bird for me.

I finally had a chance to make it over to the American Museum of Natural History to see the Rufous Hummingbird that has stayed through the winter.  It belongs much further west, so it’s been a treat for New York birders all season.