Welcome back!

A flock of Yellow-rumped Warblers came in this morning; I had already seen one or two of these winter birds but this was the first real flock -- in first-year winter plumage of course.The eastern subspecies used to be known as the Myrtle Warbler (they got through the winter by feeding on cedar berries, bayberry berries and wax myrtle) but a recent proposal to resplit them from the western Audubon's Warbler was rejected by the powers that be so, officially, they are still Yellow-rumps. Either way, it was nice to welcome them back. Song, Swamp and Chipping Sparrows but no White-throats yet. They should be along any day now. Two Peregrine Falcons and one Merlin came over the creek this morning, perhaps the beginning of a hawk flight (alas I couldn't hang around to find out). Other activity on the creek included the return of the Royal Terns after a couple of days absence and our regular patrolling Madame Kingfisher -- I assume it's always the same bird. She landed on the dead cedar by the pond with a nice fish in her beak but took off again when she saw me; the Kingfishers are just about as untame as any of our birds. The good news is that there are fish in the creek available to be caught by terns and kingfishers. The best story of the day was my discovery of a large non-Osprey perched next to the Osprey nest -- silvery on the back, white on the breast with a white wing bar, etc. etc. I simply could not resolve it well enough with my binoculars to identify it; it did not resemble anything that I was familiar with. I ran back to the house to get the spotting scope and finally had a great look at a large piece of plastic stuck in the side of the nest! Eric Salzman