Thanks to concurrent surveys between Corey Riding’s project and my own, I learned Monday (5/25) of a bird that I had missed on Sunday (5/24): At the north entrance and tucked under some shrubs is a Mourning Warbler. I missed the bird on two consecutive surveys. Corey thinks it must have come in sometime during the day on Saturday (5/23).
I’m not too upset to have missed this bird – twice! – because it is waterlogged and cryptic against the background mulch on which it lies and I could only see it from a specific angle that I rarely take when investigating that section of shrubbery. The key is not to never miss a bird on a survey, it’s to conduct redundant surveys to estimate how many I might be missing. Thankfully, that number seems to be quite low, but we’ll know better what it actually is in a few months.
Both Mourning Warbler and the Swainson’s Thrush were in place this morning.
Bird-Window Collisions at OK State 