February hasn’t been so good for finding new birds for me… though I haven’t gone off to any new birding areas since January.

I did see 7 new birds in February so far…

Today I went back to a pond area that I’ve been walking around for the past couple of weeks. People list on E-bird the birds that they have seen there and I just keep going back and continue to try to find these birds… after walking around for about an hour today I was starting to think that the person who thought that they saw a Sora was just confused and probably just saw the Virginia Rail (which I did see there this week)…

But just when I decided that I wasn’t going to find any new birds today and told myself to just enjoy the walk and sunshine, I heard it… I heard the call of the Sora! They have a very distinctive call, but it wasn’t where I had been looking at all. I had been looking in the reeds along the edge of the ponds, but this Sora was actually off behind the path in some reeds in a low wetlands area…

I would love to show you a photo of the Virginia Rail that I saw this week, but I have yet to get a photo of one, though I have seen them a few times. They are similar in size to the Sora, but have a longer bill and seem to blend into their surrounds a bit better… there was one time that I was actually staring at a mother Virginia Rail and her chick just below a platform that I was standing on and I wasn’t able to focus my eyes on them!!! My brother kept saying, “Do you see them, do you see them, they are right there below us!” Nooooooo, I never could say that I saw them that day!

After seeing the Sora today, I continued on my walk, content to have found one bird… then off to my side, a bit of yellow fluttered around in a small tree. I took a good long look and even got a few photos of a Wilson’s Warbler.

Finally, at the last pond on the walk, I worked the shoreline with my binoculars, searching for the one Common Gallinule that someone had claimed to have seen there… the Gallinule looks a lot like the American Coot (which there were probably about 100 of in the ponds today)! I think I looked at everyone of them!  At last, I picked up on a bit of red across the pond, hiding under some low branches, there he was, the one and only (at least at these ponds), the Common Gallinule!

Below is the American Coot, they are a bit chunkier and have a white bill.

So in the end I added 3 more birds today, not bad for a short walk around a few ponds! 🙂