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Northern Pintail at Cutler Wetland Friday St. Patrick's Day
Posted by Trey Mitchell
over 7 years ago
3 Comments
Miriam Y. Avello and Yve Morrell found a Pintail at Cutler Wetlands today and put me on the bird for Bird A Day. Yve Morrell is doing an ABA Big Year and is here adding birds like Yellow-bellied Flycatcher and Blue-winged Warbler to her list. Good luck and thanks for showing me the Pintail.
Comments
Jeanne Kaufmam reported that bird on March 14, 2017 on ebird perhaps she was the one who found it.
Jeanne Kaufmam is a great birder, photographer and a friend. I had no way to know she saw a Northern Pintail at Cutler Wetland. That's one of the problems with eBird in my opinion. It's great to record observations there, but the think people are notified when you see something just isn't going to happen regularly. I would have thought a Northern Pintail would show up in the list of notable observations. I check that every day on the BirdADay.net website. After your post I went back and looked at that day of notable bird and Northern Pintail wasn't there. So I'm sorry for not giving the credit to Jeanne, but I had no way to know she saw the bird. She wasn't aware that a Pintail was something good to see at Cutler Wetland. Only a few have been seen there and as far as I know they are uncommon in Miami-Dade county. At least that is my perception.
Thank you for the high praise and your friendship, Trey! Funny thing about the Northern Pintail. Not being familiar with it, it took me an hour to look through my apps and bird guides to try to identify it. It was hanging out so closely with the Mottled Duck in my photos, that I wasn't sure it if was just some variation. When I posted my sighting on eBird, I noticed that Tom Auer had seen the bird a few days earlier. This gave me confidence that my id was correct. Still, I didn't realize it was anything other than a regular sighting. Perhaps Tom also didn't realize that this was a special sighting, and as you say, it didn't show up on any alert. Credit really goes to Tom! Sure wish I had seen the Blue-winged Teals and Dowitchers that he listed, and I think he was the person who spotted the Yellow-bellied Flycatcher also. Kudos to Tom!
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