Amazingly, it was a visiting birder from New York who discovered Neotropic Cormorants breeding in the Wakodahatchee Wetlands.
Corey is a New Yorker who lived most of his life in upstate New York but has lived in Queens since 2008. He's only been birding since 2005 but has garnered a respectable life list by birding whenever he wasn't working as a union representative or spending time with his family. He lives in Forest Hills with Daisy and Desmond Shearwater. His bird photographs have appeared on the Today Show, in Birding, Living Bird Magazine, Bird Watcher's Digest, and many other fine publications. He is also the author of the American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of New York.
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This is a really weird report. It’s amazing that a bird like this could stay hidden for so long at a site as small and intensely birded as Wakodahatchee Wetlands.
I don’t think it’s that surprising. Ironic, yes. I’ve birded Wakodahatchee since it opened, and I’ve always found nature photographers there, but not many hard core birders.
I was wondering when that was going to happen.
I guess birders mostly see what they are looking for, and no one was looking at cormorants in Florida because of the assumption that they would all just be DC cormorants. If birders think there is no vagrant potential in a certain bird group, vagrants will never be found.