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by Elliotte Rusty Harold.
Original Post: #490-493 at Laguna Cartagena
Feed Title: Mokka mit Schlag
Feed URL: http://www.elharo.com/blog/feed/atom/?
Feed Description: Ranting and Raving
Today Beth and I drove up to Lajas and Laguna Cartagena, allegedly one of the best and least visited birding sites in Puerto Rico. As a large freshwater pond, it supports a lot of species that aren’t easily found elsewhere. It’s a bit hard to find and our directions weren’t great, but we got to the southeast entrance around 9:00 A.M. The area’s overgrown and the first birds we found were Gallus gallus (i.e. chickens) but we also sa a lot of Gray Kingbirds and some Cattle Egrets. Mostly though it was the same stuff we’d seen elsewhere until this last bird I first misidentified as a Smooth-billed Ani. However a closer look at the photos showed it was no such thing. The bill is completely wrong:
In fact I now think this is a Shiny Cowbird.
We did find multiple real Smooth-billed Anis at the next entrance on the west side (after an unplanned hour and a half detour to Mayaguez due to overly trusting in the GPS.)
In the Laguna itself we found dozens of Common Moorhens and dozens more of Caribbean Coots. These look a lot like American Coots, but the white shield extends further up the head. Seems I neglected to take any pictures of these though. :-(
Just a bit further down the path I scoped 20+ West Indian Whistling Ducks that eventually took off from the pond:
The road looked dicey so we sadly didn’t continue on to the tower, but finally on the road out, we stopped to check out some small birds flushed from the road. These proved to be the introduced species Bronze Mannikin:
I’m not sure if these are officially countable here or not. If they are, that’s #494 but I’ll be cautious for now and leave it out. No photos in either case. It was hard enough putting binoculars on these small birds in the heavy Caribbean spring foliage.
West Indian Whistling-Duck
Blue-winged Teal
White-cheeked Pintail
Ruddy Duck
Great Egret
Snowy Egret
Little Blue Heron
Cattle Egret
Green Heron
Glossy Ibis
Turkey Vulture
Common Moorhen
Caribbean Coot
Killdeer
Rock Pigeon
Common Ground-Dove
White-winged Dove
a
Smooth-billed Ani
Gray Kingbird
Greater Antillean Grackle
Shiny Cowbird
Bronze Mannikin
Northern Mockingbird
Finally we drove on to Cabo Roja to try for Brown Booby. No luck there but we did find quite a few shorebird species on the flats:
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