ML646601786

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Wow… what an emotional whirlwind this bird was. Not long after I saw a late Nashville which perked me up a bit after a rather quiet start to the morning, I began to hear another warbler chipping up the path. Something reminiscent of an orange-crowned but flatter and sweeter. At the top of a scraggly, vine-covered Sweet Gum tree roughly here (40.841340, -73.933148) I see the source of the chipping. At this point, I felt as though my heart stopped as I put my binoculars up to my face to see an (albeit quite backlit) view of an immature male/female Townsend’s warbler poking at a Sweet Gum ball. Unfortunately, this view lasted only a mere second or two before it flew up into the big, hollow London Plane tree on the west side of the bike path. My heart began racing as I’m now fumbling through my backpack for my camera and just like that. It’s gone. The next 30-45 minutes are filled with panicked searching and feelings of self-doubt. I had basically all but given up when on my way out of the park heading towards Edgecombe Ave, I heard some chipping from a Siberian elm here (40.840596, -73.934271) and there it is. Phew!!!! Frantically foraging and staying high in the canopy, favoring basically only the leafy trees as many trees are already bare. I managed to snap a couple docu-shots with my broken camera and get some audio. This appears to be at least a 2nd county record for New York County. I can find at least one other record from 1963 in Central Park “Singing subadult male. May 4, 1963 (Cantor, Benjamin Gilbert, Betsy Loeb; see Linnaean Newsletter, V. 18 no. 2, Apr. 1964)” This should be updated in eBird at some point.