Birds and Bugs of the August Long Weekend

Gray Comma

Today marked the beginning of the August long weekend and I found some great birds and bugs to start it off. I went to the Richmond Lagoons first, curious to see if any shorebirds had shown up in the first cell. None had, but I heard a Common Gallinule squeaking in the reeds near the observation deck. There were lots of flycatchers around; I heard two Alder Flycatchers still singing away, and saw one unidentified flycatcher in the parking lot and two more in the shrubs between the first two cells. None of these were singing, and I couldn’t identify them from their call notes. I thought the one in the parking lot made a sound like the “whit!” of a Least Flycatcher, but the ones along the berm sounded similar, and when I checked my birding app on my phone the Alder Flycatcher’s call note didn’t sound much different from a Least Flycatcher.