I started following the Nova Scotia Bird Society on Facebook a couple years ago. I enjoy checking out birds and maybe seeing a few that I haven’t seen before. Or at least a few that I haven’t noticed before.
I saw a few different warblers over the summer this year. I’m sure they have been around in previous years, but this time around some of them seemed to want to perch right in front of me. So I managed to catch sight of a black and white warbler, a yellow warbler and what I think was a female black throated blue warbler, but a friend and I are still arguing about that one. He says vireo, I say warbler. Since we were sitting on the deck having a few refreshments at the time, it is possible neither one of us was correct.
But I had never seen any of these birds before, so it was nice of them to drop by and perch right where I could see them. It would have been nicer if they would have reminded me to keep my camera handy. But that didn’t happen.
The thing was, they came to me. I didn’t have to wander all over the countryside trying to find them.
Yesterday, I started noticing a lot of pictures of a very different looking bird popping up in my news feed. It was a scissor-tailed flycatcher. A bird with a rather long tail that likes to perform some rather acrobatic stunts while chowing down on flying insects. This is a bird that generally lives in the south. Places like Texas and Oklahoma. In fact, it is the state bird of Oklahoma. But it doesn’t belong here.
But the pictures kept popping up as more and more birders from across the province kept flocking to take pictures of this bird. I can imagine the bird was probably quite confused by his sudden popularity. He probably blew in on the winds of a storm and suddenly found himself the subject of many numbers of photographs.
And the thing is, all these pictures were from Liverpool. Really not that far from my house. I did take a quick look around last evening before it got too dark, but had no luck. Now that I think of it, I should have been looking for hordes of people with cameras. Much easier to spot than a small bird even if it does have a really long tail.
Hopefully, this little bird will make it back home, before our weather gets too cool for him. But there is a good chance if I would have stayed home, I might have seen him. Maybe he was dropping by to say hello, like all the various warblers this summer. Sorry I missed him.
