We have so little of the year left, yet so much left to do. With holiday preparations and Christmas Bird Count scouting, it’s all a person can do to find a couple more ticks for the year list. Truly, this is a time of year to have your priorities in order!

My priority this weekend was our annual excursion to cut down a Christmas tree. We picked a beauty, but its massive trunk necessitated a ton of work both in the field and at home in order to shave it down thin enough for our tree stand. No wonder Dark-eyed Juncos flew in to watch me struggle. Corey spent his weekend scouting for the Queens County Christmas Bird Count, which was fruitful, as he refound a lingering Yellow-crowned Night-Heron and some other goodies that he hopes stick around for the next week to be counted. But his Best Bird of the Weekend was another lingering species, a Yellow-breasted Chat, which was the only of the trio of winter rarities that he tracked down at Crocheron Park.

How about you? What was your best bird of the weekend? Tell us in the comments section about the rarest, loveliest, or most fascinating bird you observed. If you’ve blogged about your weekend experience, you should include a link in your comment.

Written by Mike
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.