Putnam County Big Day for Birding

Putnam County Big Day

By Sean Camillieri

During the weekend of October 8th, 2021, our fellow Audubon Chapter to the south - Saw Mill River - hosted their third annual fall Birdathon. Their purpose first and foremost was to raise money for the organization and for bird conservation.  Competition comes second, though only sort of…..  Since Kyle Bardwell and I both live in Putnam County and serve on the board for Putnam Highlands Audubon, we thought it would be a great idea to have a big day here in Putnam County. Our team name was “Quick Three Beers” (What bird’s song sounds like that?……………..Olive-sided flycatcher)

Now, the rules for this friendly competition were simple:  see as many bird species as you can within a 24 hour period. Most teams birded in Westchester and another team birded in Dutchess County. You could imagine, however, as this put Kyle and I at a great disadvantage since we didn’t have the coast and large swaths of the Hudson River like both neighboring counties do.  So we had to get creative and take advantage of Putnam’s small size and easy quick access to various birding hotspots. In my head, I already had us down several species because birds like Herring Gull, Great Black-backed Gull, Laughing Gull, Great and Snowy Egrets, Osprey, Monk Parakeet, and Clapper Rail are all relatively easy birds to see in the other two counties but harder to see here in Putnam.

We began our evening on October 8th at 5:30pm with our lovely girlfriends at the Maybrook Trail way in Patterson.  We then walked the trail down to the William Clough Preserve, at first scanning the marsh for ducks but also listening for rails and owls. Sounds like a lovely place for a double date, right? The swamps that line the trail, to our amazement, had hundreds of Wood Ducks, some Green-winged Teal, Pied-Billed Grebe, and a less common marsh bird known as the Common Gallinule. We also had a flyover Osprey, which was a great bird that I was concerned we wouldn’t get. We continued to walk down the rail trail into the night and before we entered the preserve we heard a familiar “WHO COOKS FOR YOU?!” coming from the woods; we got our Barred Owl! We walked slowly through the preserve and not after long afterwards heard the hooting of a Great-horned Owl, and then a few minutes later the bizarre grunting of a Virginia Rail coming right from the marsh. After that we decided to call it a night.

The next morning, Kyle and I began at Pelton Pond listening for Eastern Screech Owl: swing and a miss!  We then hustled over to Hubbard Lodge, where we ditched one car and quickly proceeded to Foundry Cove where we luckily heard a screech owl trilling just outside of the park. We then maybe broke a few traffic laws and set some new land speed records but we got back over to Hubbard for a bird that was a long shot and seldom seen or heard in the fall - the American Woodcock. This species does breed around the wetlands near the lodge and they can be heard “peenting” and doing their display flight every spring but the fall is a different story - there’s no peenting, just the twittering of their wings as they fly round. Kyle wouldn’t admit it but he had NO faith that we were going to get these birds, then at 6:28am we were alerted to not one but THREE American Woodcocks flying over us. Kyle shook his head in happy disbelief, and we then we went on with the day.

We traveled to Barret Pond where we saw Solitary Sandpiper, Killdeer and a Spotted Sandpiper. Then it was off to Glynwood Farm, where we were graciously given last minute permission to walk the grounds.  We tallied Vesper and White-crowned Sparrows, American Pipit, and American Kestrel. We spotted 52 species at Glynwood alone, and Kyle and I decided that we were cooking with some serious gas at this point. Very exciting! We then crisscrossed the county, making little stops in-between while also trying to find birds flying over the car. We checked the reservoirs in Carmel, Lake Carmel and White Pond, and we finally ended at Constitution Marsh where we had excellent birds to end the day such as Nashville Warbler, Peregrine Falcon, Great Egret, and a GRAY-CHEEKED THRUSH!

Our big day ended at 5:38pm and we logged a total of 91 species in the county! We couldn’t believe it and we rewarded ourselves with a few adult beverages at the end to celebrate. For such a small county, there was an awful lot to see and we had dozens of other places to go. According to Putnam County birding legends Ralph Odell and Charlie Roberto a Putnam big day had never been done before. The kind comments from these two highly-regarded individuals made what was already a great day for us even more memorable