Category Archives: Rare Birds

Posts about rare birds

Curve-billed Thrasher, June 18, 2014

Curve-billed Thrasher

Curve-billed Thrasher. Photo by Nathan Goldberg. (click to see the larger version)

Montrose regular Luiz Munoz found a Curve-billed Thrasher (Toxostoma curvirostre) near the Magic Hedge on Wednesday, June 18. The bird was seen and photographed by many, and as of June 22 is still present. Curve-billed Thrashers are normally found in the southwest United States and northern Mexico, though they do wander and there are extralimital records for several Midwestern states. This is just the second Illinois record of this species, the first coming from Rend Lake in December, 1992, as well as the 338th species recorded from Montrose.

To see a list of the birds that have been recorded at Montrose, please refer to the Birds Recorded at the Montrose Point Area in Chicago page.

Ten Year Anniversary of the Black-tailed Gull

Black-tailed Gull

2003 Montrose Black-tailed Gull (click to see a larger version)

August 7, 2013 is the ten year anniversary of the Montrose Black-tailed Gull. This is my account of that sighting.

Early on the morning of August 7, 2003, Chicago birder Mike Miller was scanning Montrose Beach and noticed an odd dark gull among the local Ring-billed Gulls that had gathered at the west end of the beach. I was standing next to Mike and when I heard him utter the words “There’s a darker backed gull over here” I swung my telescope around to where he was looking and almost immediately saw what looked like an adult Lesser Black-backed Gull. In the back of my mind however I knew this could be the coveted Black-tailed Gull that had been seen as recently as the day before at Miller Beach in Indiana, and several months earlier along the southern Wisconsin lakefront. We were too far away to see the diagnostic red tip to the bill, so with hearts racing and hopes soaring we picked up our scopes and gear and ran over to get a better look at the bird. With closer views the red tipped bill was visible, clinching the identification as a Black-tailed Gull (Larus crassirostris), almost certainly the Black-tailed Gull that had apparently been wandering around Lake Michigan for the past few months. After taking a few dozen photos I made a mental description of the bird: about the same size as a Ring-billed Gull, slaty-gray mantle similar in color to a graellsii Lesser Black-backed Gull (Larus fuscus), yellow legs, yellow bill with a black subterminal band and red tip, and black tail band. Within minutes other birders started to arrive including Montrose regulars Kanae Hirabayashi and John Purcell. I decided that I had enough photos of the bird so I sped home to get word out of the Asian vagrant that was at Montrose Beach. Luckily, the Black-tailed Gull spent several hours at Montrose and, unlike the earlier sightings in Wisconsin and Indiana, was seen by a number of birders. The bird also made the Channel 7 evening news, the Chicago Tribune, and the MSNBC Web site.

The Black-tailed Gull is normally found in the western Pacific Ocean around Japan (Harrison 1983). Indeed, one of the common names of this species is Japanese Gull. There are about 11 records for Alaska and another 9 or so for the rest of North America, including sightings as far south as Belize and as far east as Newfoundland, Canada (Lethaby and Bangma 1998). What makes the Chicago Black-tailed Gull significant is that there is only one previous interior North American record of this species, a bird seen in 1987 at Lake Winnepegosis, Manitoba. Clearly this is not a species that is likely to show up in the Midwest.

Note: This story appeared in Volume 13, Number 2 of Meadowlark, A Journal of Illinois Birds, the quarterly journal of the Illinois Ornithological Society.

Literature Cited

Harrison, Peter 1983. Seabirds, An Identification Guide. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston MA, 448 pp.

Lethaby, Nick and Jim Bangma 1998. Identifying Black-tailed Gull in North America. Birding 30 (6): 470-483.

Mottled Ducks! (Upon further review, not)

Mottled Ducks

Mottled Ducks. Photo by Kanae Hirabayashi (click to see the larger version).

Kanae Hirabayashi and Luiz Munoz found two Mottled Ducks, both apparent males, at Montrose Beach on May 30. This is an unexpected and extraordinary sighting. Illinois has a handful of Mottled Duck records but this is a first for Cook County, and obviously Montrose. Unfortunately for other birders, a careless photographer got too close to the birds and they flew off. They haven’t been seen since. This is the 337th species of bird recorded at Montrose.

Addendum: The photos of these birds show evidence of hybridization with Mallards, specifically, curled uppertail coverts and white in the outer tail feathers. Therefore, Mottled Duck has been removed from the list of birds recorded at Montrose.

To see a list of the birds recorded at Montrose, please refer to the Birds Recorded at the Montrose Point Area in Chicago page.

Blast From the Past – Black Rail, May 30, 1994

Black Rail

Photo by Kanae Hirabayashi (click to see the larger version).

On May 30, 1994, Chicago birder Kanae Hirabayashi found a Black Rail at Montrose. The bird put on quite a show for the dozens of people who saw it, walking around in the open and giving mouth watering looks. This bird was a lifer for many birders, including myself, and I haven’t seen one since. On a side note, all of the rails that have been recorded in Illinois have been seen at Montrose.

Smith’s Longspurs, April 28, 2013

Smith's Longspurs

Male Smith’s Longspurs. Photo by Matthew Cvetas. (click to see the larger version)

Karen Mansfield and I found a male Smith’s Longspur in the dunes this morning. The bird was initially in the open sandy and grassy area just south of the cottonwoods, but after a few minutes it flew north and landed in the dunes north of the cottonwoods. We didn’t follow the bird after the initial observation but others reported that this and a second Smith’s eventually flew off to the west and were not seen again. This is only the second Smith’s Longspur I’ve seen at Montrose in over 30 years of birding there.

In addition to the Smith’s, a Grasshopper Sparrow was in roughly the same area of the dunes. I also had a small loon flying north that was almost certainly a breeding plumaged Red-throated. Otherwise we saw nothing else of note and the slow spring migration continues, though I’m not going to complain too much.

Goose Pond, Indiana Spotted Redshank!

Spotted Redshank. Note the prominent whitish supercillium and reddish base to the lower mandible. (click to see the larger version)

Karen Mansfield and I drove down to Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area in Greene County, Indiana on March 30 to look for the Spotted Redshank that had been found there a couple days earlier. Spotted Redshank is a code 4 ABA rarity, with only a handful of inland North American records, as well as a lifer for Karen and I, so we were doubly excited about seeing this bird.

When we got near the town of Dugger, not far from Goose Pond, a thick fog developed, possibly the worst fog I’ve ever encountered, with visibilities down to about 100 yards at best. The fog didn’t let up when we arrived at Goose Pond and my heart sank a little as I realized we wouldn’t be able to see the bird in such conditions.

When we arrived at County Road 400S we saw cars from several different states parked along the side of the road and a large contingent of birders lined up on the levee at area E, one of two areas where the bird had been seen. We joined the group and waited for the fog to lift. We could hear Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs, Pectoral Sandpipers and other shorebirds in the field but the fog reduced most of these to nothing more than shadowy silhouettes. After about an hour and a half the fog started to lift and we could visually identify the birds we were hearing. Within a few minutes someone yelled out that the redshank was in field B, about a half mile from where we were, so we picked up our gear and walked as fast as we could to what was going to be our experience-of-a-lifetime Spotted Redshank. When we neared the area we saw people walking towards us, saying and gesturing that the bird had flown back to area E. Undaunted, we turned around and raced back to area E and found the bird at some distance in the same field we had just been scoping. Not more than 2 minutes later the bird got up and flew off to the north, apparently back to area B, so back to area B we raced. By this time I was working up a good sweat and a good irritation that the bird was playing so hard to get, but it settled down and gave us nice long looks and a few distant photos. All’s well that ends well.