#846 Mississippi Kites in Sterling Forest
Usually rare birds for an area are just vagrants, but this summer a pair of Mississippi Kites actually built a nest and started breeding in Sterling Forest! Growing up in Louisiana you’d think I’d already have Mississippi Kite on my life list, but I guess I wasn’t paying that much attention to birds back then. So Janet, Monica, Sandi, and I stopped at Sterling Forest on our way up to the Adirondack Birding Festival on Thursday to try to find them. Unfortunately we were too late. They were seen earlier that morning but after a bad traffic jam in the Bronx we didn’t get there until around 11:00. :-( I suppose we could have stayed till the late afternoon when they usually return to the nest, but we had a long drive still ahead of us to Hamilton County.
We returned to the Sterling Forest parking lot on Sunday afternoon on our way back from the festival. Still no Kites. damn. However just as it was starting to rain again and we were getting ready to give up we ran into another birder who told us the kites were indeed still there and visible from a spot just down the road. So we trotted on down and there they were, both of them:
They were in fact more or less in the vicinity of where we had been looking, but their particular perches were blocked from our previous vantage point. Oops.
