October is the very best time of year to visit the migration wonderland of Veracruz, in southeast Mexico. For next year, WINGS is creating a series of exciting one-day field trips from our cool and convenient base in Xalapa for participants in the American Birding Association’s International Conference, October 4-10. We’ll be housed in Xalapa’s clean, comfortable, and modern Fiesta inn, with cloud-forest birding right out the door, and the Conference field trips will visit sites ranging from the “river of raptors” on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico to the pine forests of the Xalapa Highlands.

For a preview, watch Rick Wright’s b-log for brief reports on his recent scouting trip to Xalapa with the ABA’s Tamie Bulow and Robert Straub, author of the Site Guide to the Birds of Veracruz and the local trip coordinator for what promises to be one of the most exciting and birdiest ABA conferences ever.

Red Warbler, one of the prizes of the Xalapa Highlands. Photo: Chris Wood.

Birding wonders never cease, and last Friday saw a doozy in Baja California Sur: Mexico’s first Little Bunting was beautifully photographed at San Jose de Castro.

Little Bunting, Baja California Sur, with kind permission of Kurt Radamaker.

Baja California, with its endemics and the odd startling vagrant, is full of astonishments at any time of year, but fall through spring offers opportunities  to enjoy multitudes of wintering passerines, seabirds, and shorebirds. And who knows, maybe a vagrant or two….

Turnabout is fair play, they say, and with a European Golden-Plover in Maine, it’s also been a big few days in Britain and Ireland, with a number of familiar North American vagrants to dazzle our trans-Atlantic friends.

James Lidster is now on Scilly, where two Red-eyed Vireos and a Blackpoll Warbler–all alive–have followed the discovery of the corpse of a Common Nighthawk. Bryan Bland will be joining James out there soon, and it’s extremely unlikely that anything, anything!, will get past ‘em.

Stuart Elsom was among the lucky crowds enjoying Britain’s first Alder Flycatcher, then took off for Ireland, where the big draws are a Little Blue Heron and a Scarlet Tanager. As Jill Williams observed, it’s a good thing that Stuart legitimately had the day off from work, as he was prominently filmed by the BBC at the scene of the twitch!

An adult European Golden-Plover, said to be the first ever for the continental US, is being seen at Maine’s Scarborough Marsh this afternoon. The bird, in company with southbound American Golden-Plovers, has been well photographed–and is drawing birders from all across the country.

The latest trivia question from our WINGS e-newsletter:

The three most exacting tasks in the life of a migratory bird are breeding, molting, and migration. Because each of these activities takes so much energy, migratory birds typically undertake only one at a time. Name one species that engages fully in all three activities simultaneously.

Common Murres–here photographed in Alaska by Brian Sullivan with Horned Puffins and Thick-billed Murres–lead what BNA Online delicately describes as “an energetically costly lifestyle.” With their dependent chicks still in tow, adult males begin their migration by swimming to traditional areas to molt, thus migrating, molting, and breeding all at once.

Watch for a new trivia question in our next newsletter!

Our question: Which predatory bird lures its avian prey with imitations of their vocalizations?

Northern Shrike in Alaska. Photo: Gary Rosenberg

Our answer: The winter song of Northern Shrike–a fearsome predator if ever there was one–frequently includes imitations that are attractive to the smaller birds that make up a significant part of the shrike’s winter diet. The Gray Butcherbird of Australia is also said to use a similar hunting technique.

Senior Leader James Lidster plans a busy autumn:

Those of you who have traveled with me on WINGS tours know how fond I am of quoting the Dutch and their proactive attitude to splitting new species. For the past 15 years they’ve led the way in pushing the boundaries of the Physiological Species Concept (PSC), and slowly but surely many other European countries are following suit. Of course, it doesn’t mean that they’re always right, but they are, at least, making more birders more “taxon-aware.”

Well, with this in mind and the fact that my world list isn’t increasing that much, I decided to look into imaginative ways to increase my list. The simplest seemed to be to find a Dutch girlfriend and move to The Netherlands.

And so after 32 years in England (with a few of those years out of the country leading trips), I’m moving to Arnhem. Of course my girlfriend thinks it’s all for her, but my list really has shot up….

The Netherlands is a great place to live, close enough to the UK to nip back and see family and friends, with good infrastructure, great birding, and great apple cake–and with that in mind (the birding and the apple cake!) I’ll be setting up some new tours to my new home.

Early exploration of birding sites has already led me and Roy Slaterus to discover a White-rumped Sandpiper (Bonapartes Strandloper), about the 30th Dutch record. My new tours are sure to involve some winter birding for White-tailed Eagle, Smew, and thousands of geese; late summer/early autumn expeditions for an abundance of shorebirds; and early spring birding for woodpeckers, owls, and geese (cheating slightly by spending some time in Belgium).

The next few weeks will be taken up with the obligatory house maintenance and painting (there’s a reason I work as a bird guide and not a builder!), keeping an eye on the berry bushes outside to see if Bohemian Waxwing can make it onto the garden list.

Photo: Gary Rosenberg.

Of course I’ll be on the Isles of Scilly for a couple of weeks in October, a great place to enjoy some quality birding, meet up with old friends and tour participants, and maybe emulate last year’s success in finding England’s second Wilson’s Snipe (another one split by the Dutch but not by the English!) before a month in Ghana. The lengths some people will go to get out of working around the house!

Version 1.7 of the IOC’s World Bird List is now available on line. This list includes the recommended English names of 10,354 bird species from around the world; also available for download at the same website is a very useful concordance of the IOC names with those used in the latest edition of Clements–terrifically helpful for world birders.

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, not the state bird of Texas–though it should be! Photo: Beth Russell.

September’s Hurricane Ike reshaped some of the best-known birding sites in Texas and Louisiana. We’re happy to report that Jon Dunn’s tour of the Upper Texas Coast will run in 2009 as scheduled, and that we’re hoping to have a revamped Texas Migration Week return in 2010. Meanwhile, Gavin Bieber’s Whooping Cranes will take place in January, and his Rio Grande Valley tour has been rescheduled to mesh with the April 2009 ABA Convention in Corpus Christi.

Ornithomedia reports the discovery of a “significant” colony of Ivory Gulls in Siberia’s Kara Sea. The birds were found on the Geiberg Islands, in the Vilkitski Strait between Severnaya Zemlya and the Taimyr Peninsula. There’s no word yet on how large this new colony is, but with a rapidly declining population estimated at only about 11,000 pairs, this charismatic species needs every bit of help it can get.

This adult Ivory Gull was a highlight of our 2007 tour to Newfoundland; we’ve also encountered the species at Gambell.  Photo: Bruce Mactavish.