hey FMers

many of you who frequent the nature/wildlife board know i am a HUGE north american bird lister. yesterday, a wood sandpiper was found in rhode island. this is only the third record of this bird in the lower 48 states EVER. it is a eurasian species that occasionally gets lost and wanders onto the aleutians in alaska, but outside of that it is near impossible to see it in north american. so, as soon as word got out that the bird had been spotted, folks from all over new england descended, today, sunday, to try to refind the bird which we were able to do. needless to say all of us had telescopes and cameras and whatnot. i was able to pull myself away from the bird for few seconds to snap a shot of the crowd - here it is!

photos of the bird will be in the nature/wildlife forum in the next day or so for those who care.

enjoy

dorian

that certainly fits the theme, and a great backstory...gonna venture over to the other board to look for the results.

There was a podcast with a segment about serious bird watching, this shot and story really remind me of it. Do you get automated alerts when a rare bird is spotted?

Diggin it ... kinda reminds me of the old adage @ "f8 and be there" ... the backstory makes it special, but you still had to "be there" to get the shot.

thanks for the nice words friends! there are internet posting sites that i check multiple times a day. i am not sure if birding at the level at which i do it is more aptly compared to being addicted to something or having a chronic disease......

i also realize i got lazy and exported this pic right from iphoto without going through my usual processing pipeline. this explains why it looks kinda crappy!

i remembered a website from the podcast : NARBA

Nice find and story.

Norm