July 2025

I only ever recorded two lifers on my birthday, and they both have a pretty similar story. They were both very common local birds that I saw soon after arriving in a new country.

I came to New York mid-July 2010 and at first I was living with one of my coworkers in Crown Heights. My first lifer was a Laughing Gull spotted from a cab as I was riding to his place from the airport. But I was looking for my own place to rent. So on my birthday I went to look at an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. Turned out, the apartment was above some bar or cafe, and the owner pretty honestly said it can get noisy.

But there, in Hoboken, on the Hudson River, I have recorded my first Canada Goose! Now when I am thinking about this, it seems strange, because by that time I have already visited Prospect Park and I think there might have been Canada Geese there on the ponds. Either there were none, or I considered them uncountable as domesticated park birds at that time. Anyway, I am not even going to check the photo archive, since I do not want to change my records.

And the next day I went to Central Park and found such good lifers as Wood Duck and Louisiana Waterthrush.

Photo: not that bird, but another one I saw later in Queens. It was banded four years earlier not too far away, in Atlantic Beach, NY.

Now to the next story. We arrived in Manitoba mid-June, so by my birthday I already had a good list of common birds of Winnipeg, but I never went out of the city.

At that time there was a Mississippi Kite (a big rarity) hanging in a particular neighbourhood, so I wanted to go and see it on my birthday. But the plans have changed, we were going to a boat trip down the Red River organized by the members of the Russian-speaking (i.e. post-Soviet) community. As a new immigrant, who does not know anyone and does not have a job, you are supposed to socialize and make connections, right? Frankly I do not remember a lot from this trip, besides deafeningly loud amateur performance of Soviet pop hits. No useful connections were made.

But there was a benefit to it: I had a chance to look at the banks of the Red River and its birds. That day I spotted for the first time in Manitoba some species already familiar to me from New York: Osprey, Turkey Vulture, American Herring Gull, Great Blue Heron. But most importantly – a lifer: Franklin’s Gull.

As for the Mississippi Kite I went and found it the next day.

Photo: not that day.