Lifer Snowy Owl!

We've been having quite the irruptive year for Snowy Owls here on the east coast, and a bunch here in Maine. After going into a food coma yesterday and missing out on my Thanksgiving Day birding, AB and I went down to the shore near the Biddeford Pool (about an hour away) to look for a Snowy that had been seen there last week.

We went out to the shoreline at the end of Orcutt Road:

 It wasn't anywhere this green out there (image is a screen capture of Google Maps). You see the little island there in the right corner, the one on the left? That was easily visible from Ocean Avenue, where I parked. I walked a little path through the brush to the rocks, my eyes fixed on a white blob on the rock.

Once I got to the rocks, I set up my little scope, focused, and BAM:

I know this is an awful photo, but that white shape on the rocks is a SNOWY OWL! Bird number 415!

We watched him for a while, and we were joined by others looking for the same owl. After seeing some Ruddy Turnstones (beautiful!), Common Eiders, a Horned Grebe, Common and Red-breasted Mergansers, and a lone female Harlequin Duck, we headed home.

Sweet success!

FINALLY! A Brown Creeper photo!

I've been compiling a lifelist since 2006, and sometime after that point (when I got a camera) I started keeping a lifephotos folder as well. It took many, many sightings, but I finally got a good photo of a Brown Creeper for my file:

What a sweet little bird! He's up here in the frozen north, though I would think he'd have headed south by now. The weather's awfully chilly today (24 degrees, with gusty winds up to 28 mph; windchill in the low teens), so I hope he's okay.