Twitching

I'm a little embarassed to admit we went twitching today. Twitching is a birding term for traveling some distance just to get a look at a rare bird. I'm not crazy about the idea for a couple of reasons. First, it's not exactly ecologically sound to drive a great distance for something so frankly frivolous. Second, it can be harmful for a rare bird to be mobbed by eager birders anxious to get it on their life lists. Just last year, I believe it was, a Burrowing Owl lost it's life in the Chicago area because of too much attention.

Still, the co-conspirator and I didn't have any big plans today so we threw some optics in the car and took off for Wisconsin's East Coast to see a Black-legged Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla.) It's a pretty little gull that has been present in the harbor at Port Washington for nearly a month.

We watched it sitting on the water.



We watched it flying around.





We watched it catch and eat a fish!



All this made us hungry so we stopped at a local Mexican restaurant and had lunch before returning home. So, I guess you could say we combined two activities into one trip.