Life Bird #604 - Tufted Duck

I've been meaning to post for the last few days now, but the new year started out a little busy and it has put me a bit behind. So I'll going to go back a few days, and finish this post with the item mentioned in the title.
Wednesday night, Pam and I joined Paul & Diana for an evening out to celebrate the highlights of 2008 and to ring in 2009. Paul and I discussed heading over to Horn Pond really early Thursday day morning to see if we could have our first bird of the new year be Eastern Screech Owl (we can get them there pretty reliably) but since the thermometer was reading in the teens, and the wind was howling, we thought better of it, and soon after midnight were heading home to our warm bed.
Friday morning broke bright and cold! The temps had continued to drop and at 8am when we picked up Paul & Diana to head up to Newburyport to bird the first day of the year with the Brookline Bird Club and our friends Mark and Laura (who have led a trip on January 1st every year for 13 years for the BBC) - the thermostat read 6°. With the wind chill we were getting ready to start birding in -20°. Birding on January 1st was simply painful. Usually, I don't care about the temps and weather - I just want to get out and see as many birds as possible on the first. This time, if I couldn't see the bird within a minute of getting out of the car, I just didn't want to see it. That being said, we did ok. I passed on a few birds that would take a little bit of work that I knew I would see again - like the King Eider that has been seen reliably in Gloucester. But when a Dovekie was yelled out, I gave that a little time. And once I saw what I needed to to comfortably tick it off the list - I was right back in the car. My greatest hope at the moment is that the weather is better than this for the Superbowl of Birding in a few weeks. I know some of my teammates might be a bit uncomfortable, but with one guy coming from North Carolina, and another originally from South Africa, I don't want to be accused of bloggercide.
Don't worry guys - there are a lot of Dunkin' Donuts around here where we can warm up, fill up on coffee, and umm... hydro-regulate.
I had Friday off from work, and had all the best intentions of getting up early and doing a little birding followed by a bit o' blogging, twittering, and especially doing some work on my Cornell Lab Home Study Course in Bird Biology. But did I? NOPE.
Instead I slept late (well about 8:30 which is really late for me) then put up a pot of tea, and puttered around the house for a while, and got on-line. Realizing I hadn't read anybody else's blog for a few days, I started going down the list. See all those "Birding and Nature Blogs" listed there to the right? I read them all -regularly. When you don't go on-line for a few days, you can develop quite a backlog of blog reading (a backblog?), never mind the e-mail InBox with listserv reports coming in from several states. SO, 4.5 hours later I've caught up with e-mail, twitters, and blogs - and realize that I still need to wrap gifts and manage a dessert for later in the evening when we would be getting together with a few friends to do our annual holiday "festivus" and exchange of presents. Success - I manage toget it all done, shower and get out the door in time to pick-up Pamela at work and enjoy an evening with friends.

And now I come to today. Since Tuesday afternoon I have been thinking about a sighting that was reported in Rhode Island -a drake Tufted Duck was reported in the same place where one showed up last year (and I never went for it, and kinda regretted it ever since). I originally was going to go on Wednesday, armed with plenty of info and directions from people who went last year, as well as a few notes from the couple that found it this year (birding list-servs are really excellent for gathering info like that - put out one small RFI, and you get all the info you need - birders really are good people) but the weather was terrible - cold, windy and snowing heavily with no signs of stopping. (Not to mention that Pam couldn't go, and it would be a life bird for her too.) This morning it was bright, clear skies, a little cold, but nothing compared to the last few days. We packed up the car and headed down to RI. A lot of the reservoir where the birds had been seen was frozen over, and I started to think that it just wasn't meant to be, but after some searching, and trudging trough snow, I notices that way off in the distance there was some open water and... yes there were ducks there. A quick trip to get the scope, and sure enough, mixed in with about 8 Ring-necked Ducks there was a very handsome Tufted Duck. ABA bird #604. The light was perfect and with his bright white sides (as opposed the the soft grey on the Ring-necked) he stood out quite easily, and watching for a few moments more garnered looks at the eponymous shaggy "tuft" as the wind picked it up at certain angles. Unfortunately,the digiscoped photos I attempted at 60x are nothing but embarrassing. But since I don't want a big word post with nothing to look at... here you go. If you squint, tilt your head at an angle and look really hard, you can almost kinda see the tuft, can't you?