White New Year - January 1st, 2008

(Above - all four images from the apartment today, January 1st, 2008).

Any hopes that I might have had about getting the birding year off to a big start were dashed by the arrival of another cold front dropping another 5 or 6 six inches of fresh snow all over Hampshire County. I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't up early enough to bag a healthy bird list before breakfast and settled instead for watching the impressive gatherings of American Robins (c.250), Cedar Waxwings (c.400), and European Starlings (c.300) feeding on the local crab apple trees along North Whitney Street. Birds were in view from the bedroom windows all day long and I enjoyed checking the waxwings for Bohemians and the robins for the rarer Eurasian thrushes. Naturally, I didn't come up with either, and I couldn't repeat the Common Redpolls (c.40) and the three Pine Grosbeaks that I saw from the apartment yesterday on the last day of 2007. But I logged seventeen species, all on foot around the streets of Amherst to get the year off to a 'steady' start.


GB,


JPS.