A once in life-time experience: Yesterday I joined a group of birders on a van tour up Mt. Washington, the highest mountain in New Hampshire, to see Bicknell's Thrush. We left at 5:30 in the morning and stopped midway at about 3000 ft where the landscape turned into a stunted forest of mostly balsam fir with lesser amounts of spruce, white birch and mountain ash.
We scanned the tree tops and after a while found a BT on a distant tree bathing in the morning sun - too far for the lens on my camera.
We then heard two males chasing each other a short distance down hill from us. Suddenly one of them appeared in a tree very close to us. He wasn't shy at all.
He began singing, asserting that this territory was his.
Because of its fragmented breeding range in remote inhospitable forests at high elevations in the Northeast it is one of the least known bird species in North America. It also one of the rarest and possibly most threatened.
Distribution of Bicknell’s Thrush (BNA)
There may not be more than 50,000 individuals. Its winter range is even more restricted ; it regularly only occurs on four islands in the Greater Antilles where its habitat is threatened by deforestation.
Reference: Birds of North America Online and Jeffrey Wells' Birders Conservation Handbook
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