re: #110 FFL (GOP Delenda Est)

My brother and I helped with Christmas bird counts a few times in the late 1970s in/near the village we lived in in northern NY state. A big thing in that community was sighting cardinals during that count since I guess they tended not to overwinter that far north.* My brother and I were generally along some of the back roads getting counts of Snow Bunting flocks and edge woodland/meadow bird like chickadees, etc. A few people would go over to the outlets of the dams on the St Lawrence River where there was year-round open water and thus large numbers of geese congregated there.

* - Rough equivalent finch (seed eaters) we got in our feeders were Evening Grosbeaks. And a rare Rose-breasted Grosbeak. When I lived in western PA and had a feeder out the Grosbeaks were very rare as compared to having a lot of Cardinals. I once counted fourteen Cardinals queued up to get sunflower seeds. Splitting time with the chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, plus a blue jay jumping the line every so often. After a 8” snowfall once I saw a crow scraping snow off a block to get at seeds scattered there.

We got the Evening Grosbeaks every year or so. (Herman, PA north of PGH.) They’re very pretty, but the Cedar Waxwings were more subtle. Once we banded an albino Waxwing, but it had poor liklehood of survival in the wild.