Birding adrenaline kicks in with a great sighting

Last weekend’s Christmas Bird Counts in Gaston County and southern Lake Norman offered great birding weather, cold starts with gradual warmups through midafternoon, but I had to work pretty hard for everything I got. The numbers of birds just seem to be down so far this season. The activity in the brushy fields and thickets is a bit off.

That’s not to say there weren’t any highlights. Saturday in Gastonia I was surrounded by at least four American woodcock displaying at close range from 6:30 to about 7 a.m. I even got to see some sitting on the ground in the beam of my flashlight. Later, an orange-crowned warbler and a palm warbler in a weedy field were nice finds. At Rankin Lake I found more red-headed woodpeckers than ever before; this is clearly a good year for that species.

I met some other birders for owling at 5:30 a.m. Sunday at the Davidson College campus. A barred owl immediately let loose with a “hoo-aw” call, apparently startled by the slamming of a car door. An hour of playing playback of Eastern screech owl calls finally induced one of those little owls to answer. Well after sunup a great horned-owl hooted twice to give us the owl trifecta at one spot.

But birding the rest of the morning was more challenging. I was happy to pick up two brown creepers and up to four pine warblers in a small flock, but numbers were down. The same conditions continued at the Davidson Greenway, where many species we usually find were just absent.

It’s on such days that a real surprise can sometimes pop up out of the brush or drop down out of the trees. That was one of those days. A return trip to the college produced one of the most unexpected species ever recorded on that count.

A male Cape May warbler landed a few feet from us and offered great extended views. That bird is hundreds of miles north of where it should be this time of year. It also provided a much-needed shot of birding adrenaline that sustained us through the rest of the day.

When final results are in from each count in a few weeks I will fill you in.

This story was originally published December 25, 2015 at 5:16 PM with the headline "Birding adrenaline kicks in with a great sighting."