Late this afternoon the weather was cool and sunny, with a clear blue sky and high wind-swept white cirrus clouds, with temperature in the 50s, much warmer than the past 10 days or so, almost balmy.<\/p>\n
The most surprising sighting of the day was a Killdeer \u2013 the first time I\u2019ve ever seen one in our neighborhood. It was foraging in short, dry grass near the driveway of a home and I watched it for several minutes, just walking around. But I wasn\u2019t the first one to see it. A couple of days ago, a neighbor had stopped me to ask about a bird he had seen and could not identify \u2013 he described it well, as a good-size bird that flew and landed in a distinctive way, mostly brown, with a long dark bill and a white ring around its neck. I couldn\u2019t figure it out at the time since I\u2019d never seen one here, but after I got home, decided from his description that it must have been a Killdeer \u2013 and sure enough, today I saw it not far from his house.<\/p>\n
The Killdeer is an upland plover that\u2019s fairly common on farmland and open grassy fields. We often see them \u2013 and hear their loud, peeping calls \u2013 in parks and ball fields. I\u2019ve even found their eggs, in a shallow gravel nest, laid right on the edge of a walking trail in one park. But to see one here in our neighborhood is new. It\u2019s a handsome bird, with rather long legs, white markings on the face, brown back, white throat and belly, and what looks like a white ring around its neck is created by black bands around the upper breast.<\/p>\n
Thanks to my neighbor for a very interesting sighting!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Late this afternoon the weather was cool and sunny, with a clear blue sky and high wind-swept white cirrus clouds, with temperature in the 50s, much warmer than the past 10 days or so, almost balmy. The most surprising sighting of the day was a Killdeer \u2013 the first time I\u2019ve ever seen one in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}