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1 Dec 1996 James F. Flynn, Jr.

3 Dec 1996 Bob Zaremba

1 Dec 1996 James F. Flynn, Jr.

Thanks to an early Sunday (1 December 1998) morning call to Bill Blakeslee from Giff Beaton and a subsequent call from Bill to me at 8:00am, I told Bill that, sure, I'll go, although it was a  four-and-a-half hour drive through miserable weather and holiday traffic.  I was still mostly asleep when he called.  Since he had been awake for a while, however, he astutely recognized that I had not checked with my wife first and told me to call him back after my permission slip had been signed.  Good idea.

I picked Bill up at 9:00, with the rain subsiding in the Atlanta area.  The storm, however, was moving eastward and we soon caught up with it north of Forsyth, GA.  The next three hours were total misery, and we were almost laughing at our odds of locating the bird.  But, as Bill said, you're guaranteed not to see it if you don't try.

When we arrived at Ft. Pulaski, the rain was heavy enough to render binocs useless.  There were a lot of places where the bird could have been, and with no optics to help in the search, things were looking dim.  Luckily, though, the bird was partial to one of the batteries (Battery Hambright to be exact), so we started there.

Immediately as we rounded the mound that housed the battery, two fleeing white flags announced that we had located one of the birds, it as surprised as we.  No optics needed.  The bird flew into a tall cedar tree (!).  We decided to leave the immediate area to see if the bird would return to the ground, but it never did.  As a matter of fact, we couldn't even locate it in the tree.  We decided to head to Tybee Island to search for Purple Sandpipers and other winter specialties, feeling half-good that our quest was successful.

While at Tybee, we did find one Purple Sandpiper, but nothing else too unusual.  We did meet a couple of birders who had just come from Ft. Pulaski who did not see the Snow Bunting.  Bill and I had a terrible sinking feeling that we had scared the bird away.

The rain subsided and it was getting late, so we decided to head for home.  Ft. Pulaski was on the way, and we stopped one last time to see if the bird had returned.  As we got out of the vehicle, we noticed that the two birders we met on Tybee also had decided to give it one last try also.  We approached the battery with extreme caution this time (knowing exactly where the bird flushed from the first time), and it paid off.   The bunting had returned to the spot where we had flushed it from, and everyone was afforded a nice long look.  I even snapped a few photos of it as it peacefully fed in the lawn, although they are nothing compared to the gem taken by Bob Zaremba a couple of days later.

The sad ending to this story is that the single bunting, a basic-plumaged female, was found deceased on Thursday, 5 December 1998.  The bird was inspected by a representative of Fish and Wildlife Service, and preliminary reports were that it appeared to have died of natural causes.

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