Here'a a great birding story complete with video and photos that comes from the Birding Community E-bulletin, a report prepared monthly by birder Paul Baicich of Maryland and Wayne Peterson, a Massachusetts birder. They open each report with stories of rare and unusual birds seen in the U.S. in the month past. Everyone might not find excitement in a bird they've never seen before, but hundreds of people traveled to New Mexico to see this bird, and the excitement was very real. Here is the E-bulletin report, received Wednesday, Aug. 7.
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The rarity focus for this month is proof that you just never know what can turn up when you're looking for birds.
On July 7, Matt Daw, a member of the Bureau of Reclamation's Southwestern Willow Flycatcher survey team, was birding at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico when an apparent Rufous-necked Wood-Rail simply walked through the viewfinder of his camera while he was getting video of a cooperative Least Bittern. Go figure!
The Rufous-necked Wood-Rail is a bird often found in coastal mangroves from Mexico southward, into Central and South America. The closest this species normally occurs to the United States is in Sinaloa, on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Until Daw's fortuitous discovery, this species had never been see in the United States.
You can watch Matt Daw's original video of the Least Bittern and see for yourself the Rufous-necked Wood-Rail walking into the background. Daw was so startled that he turned off the camera after a few seconds:
