Outing #27 - Lake Crabtree Nature Trail - Southport Entrance

03/26/2017

Sometimes it's good to be lucky. Normally when I go birding these days, I'm fortunate see one new species every two or three outings. When I decided to go to Lake Crabtree's Southport area, I was hoping to get a chance to see a Herring Gull (#112 on the frequency list), which had been eluding me for quite awhile, and I hoped I might get lucky enough to spot one or more of the Red Breasted Mergansers (#126) that had showed up at the Lake a couple of days before. What I did not expect was to find four new species for the Wake County Project list in only 90 minutes!

Lesser Black Backed Gull with Ring Billed Gulls

When we arrived, another birder passed by and told us that she thought she had seen a Great Black Backed Gull (#192). These are fairly uncommon in Wake County, so we excitedly put our scopes up and started looking. The Great Black Backed Gull looks a lot like the dark-mantled gull near the center of the photo at left, but is even larger and has darker feathers. One of my fellow birders managed to get it in her scope, and we could tell from comparing it to another large gull that this was indeed a Great Black Backed. In the meantime, I had found the dark-mantled gull that you see in the above photo, but it was too small to be the Great Black Backed. Turns out, it is a Lesser Black Backed Gull (#182). We asked a couple of birders who know their gulls well to look at some photos we had taken to confirm.  So in a few minutes time, we had two relatively rare gulls to add to the list. The Lesser Black Backed was a new one for my lifelist as well.

141)  Great Black Backed Gull

142)  Lesser Black Backed Gull

We also saw two large juvenile gulls that we thought might be Herring Gulls. It was the comparative size of these gulls with the even larger Great Black Backed that helped us be sure of that first identification. We asked our gull expert friends to verify the juvenile gull photos for us as well, to be sure we had the identification right, and they confirmed. I had missed an adult Herring Gull in flight a few weeks ago on an outing to Schenk Forest. It disappeared behind some trees before I could get my binoculars on it, so I was happy to finally pick this one up at Lake Crabtree and to get some photos besides. This shot was taken through the spotting scope at somewhere between 30x and 48x magnification. The Herring Gull would be the third new species of the day for the Wake County Project list.

143)  Herring Gull

After the gulls and cormorants were flushed by something, we moved along to the main part of the lake to see if we could spot any Red Breasted Mergansers or other ducks out on the water.  I had only seen these once before, out on Lake Lynn maybe three years ago, so I was hoping to see them again. It took some time, partly because they spend at least half the time underwater as a group, but we eventually found 31 Red Breasted Mergansers diving for food down the long axis of the lake. The photo at left is the best I could do because of the great distance. But I think it shows the swept back feathers of the head and the dark breast on some of the ones at the back.

144)  Red Breasted Merganser

Now that March is almost ended, we should expect to see some new species moving through the area. According to the BirdsEye App, Blue Winged Teals have been spotted at Umstead Big Lake and Lake Crabtree County Park during the past week. Common Loon was reported yesterday at Lake Crabtree, along with Horned Grebe and Vesper Sparrow.  A Great Egret, which I have somehow missed up to this point, as well as a Yellow Breasted Chat were spotted yesterday at Lake Raleigh, and a Louisiana Waterthrush and Yellow Throated Warbler were seen this past week at Schenck Forest. These would all make great potential targets for me in the coming days and weeks.