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Thursday, October 04, 2007

More Pine Run

Quick stop at Pine Run this morning. No sign of the buff-breasteds. Still a few shorebirds: Solitary Sandpiper (1), Lesser Yellowlegs (1), Pectoral Sandpiper (1), Semipalmated Sandpiper (1), Least Sandpiper (4), Killdeer (30). Also a juvenile Northern Harrier there when I first arrived. It was tough to see what was out on the lake at Peace Valley because of fog, but did see the number of Ruddy Duck there had inched up to seven.

Most interesting bird of the morning was a leucistic (partial albino) Egyptian Goose at Peace Valley. The bird has been around for at least a month.

(Photo: Howard Eskins)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sadly, this is an exotic that bears watching; the species appears to have established self-sustaining populations at many sites in western Europe. Be vigilant!

birdchaser said...

I saw my first one "in the wild" as a kid birder in Oregon back on 1 Mar 1982. It had been reported to the rare bird alert as a Black-bellied Whistling Duck. Sadly, when my folks drove me out to Troutdale to chase that bird, we found it was really one of these guys.

When I lived in Austin, there was an injured one that spent at least a year hanging around one of the sewage ponds. I think this is my first Egyptian Goose in PA, but I haven't always kept records of exotics as well as I could.

Hear, hear on keeping track of exotics!

Anonymous said...

That is a fantastic bird. I can imagine how easy it would be for a careless observer to call it a Snow Goose.

When I first started birding, a friend took my wife and I to a condo complex in the OC that had a stable population of Egyptian Geese along with some crazy mallard hybrids. The geese were a lot easier to ID with research than the ducks.

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