Niagara Falls

Last weekend Sarah and I went to Buffalo to see one of our favorite bands Iron & Wine. Great show! It took them a little while to find their groove but once they did it was awesome. During the day we did some birding around Niagara Falls. We located a single distant LITTLE GULL among the thousands of Bonaparte's Gulls in Queenston and an adult ICELAND GULL at Sir Adam Beck. It was my first trip to Niagara Falls since I was really little so we had a good time. On Wednesday Sarah and I went searching for a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher that had been reported near Moravia, NY and had apparently been present for over a week. Unfortunately, we did not find the bird. However, I was able to add another bird to both my year list and my life list this week. The ABA Checklist committee has now accepted Common Myna, which I saw in Florida this past spring; bringing my North American Year List to 350 and my North American Life List to 450! So... my actual life bird #450 was in fact Yellow-billed Magpie, the final climactic bird of our California trip this past September. I'm probably not going to do too much more birding this year, at least not far away. But we'll see if anything really good shows up :-)