Mid-October birding can be as exciting as you–and wind and weather conditions–allow it to be. Did everything needed for a phenomenal weekend come together for you?

Our Little Big Day (only half a day birding… feel free to use the term) turned out a little smaller than Ivy and I had hoped, but we mustered 38 species on a day most migrants seemed to spend getting as far from Rochester as possible. The best of our bounty must have been some lovely Golden-crowned Kinglets signalling the tail end of our season. Corey exhausted himself doing the Sixth Annual Queens County Bird Club Big Sit out at Fort Tilden on the coast of Queens all day on Sunday. We’ll leave it to him to give a full report but he had an easy time choosing his Best Bird of the Weekend as he finally saw a Brown Pelican in Queens, flying well offshore as you can see in his heavily cropped photo above. A new Queens bird during Corey’s favorite birding event of the year made for the best Big Sit ever!

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.