May Meeting. There will be no meeting at the Gmeiner this month. In lieu of a monthly meeting, we will be holding our annual picnic at Hills Creek State Park on May 12 to coincide with the PA Migratory Bird Count. Everyone is invited to the picnic and to participate in the bird count. The bird count is an individual effort. You can count birds anywhere in the county (record species name and number of birds of each species seen). Please bring your results to the picnic. There will still be a guided bird walk at Hills Creek State Park (See below). The picnic will start at 12:00 at one of the pavillions at Hills Creek State Park (usually one in the beach area). TAS will provide hot dogs, but participants are asked to bring an easily-prepared dish to share. Even a bag of potato chips would be fine.

HCSP Bird Walks. TAS will again lead bird walks every Saturday morning in April and May at Hills Creek State Park. The walks will start at 8:00 AM and last about two hours. Meet at the office. The walks are free, and everyone is invited. As the spring migration starts to grow in intensity, birders of all levels are certain to see something of interest. April brings a variety of waterfowl, including hooded mergansers, ruddy ducks, buffleheads, ring-necked ducks, horned grebes, pied-bill grebes, etc. Common loons and bald eagles are almost guaranteed. By May, warblers and many other passerine-type species start to appear in numbers. The park has many wildflowers as well, and we certainly take the time to look at them, too. It is hard to find a better way to spend a glorious spring morning than at one of our HCSP bird walks.

Late April-Early May Bird Sightings Most migratory waterfowl have passed through now, although a few pied-bill grebes and an occasional common loon may be seen on area lakes. New arrivals include green herons, spotted sandpipers, black-throated green warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, and palm warblers. Rose-breasted grosbeaks and ruby-throated hummingbirds have been reported at feeders in the county, and a sora was heard at the Muck/Marsh Creek. Broad-winged hawks have been seen on several days, including over Hills Creek Lake. The bald eagles seem to be less prominent in recent days, but ospreys are on their nests and have been fishing the lakes regularly. New birds arrive daily, so this weekend will undoubtedly bring some surprises.

Gallery

Gallery Instructions: You can watch the gallery slideshow here, but for full-size images, click on Tiadaghton Audubon Photostream/Tiadaghton Audubon's Photos (this will take you to the Flickr site), then click on the slideshow icon in the upper right-hand corner. If the images are too large, click options and uncheck the embiggen box.

If you see a black box or nothing here at all, you will need to download and install Adobe Flash Player. You can get it for Internet Explorer here or for Mozilla Firefox here. This is a simple, free utility, and you can download and install it in less than a minute.