#7 - Northern Parula; Sandy Creek Park, NC

By the time May 2010 had rolled around, I’d been birding in the greater Triangle area for over a year. I went to such far ranging places as Mason Farm (great place), the 17 Acre Woods greenway (migrant trap!), and the vast Jordan Lake. And yet somehow I’d managed to miss a little park tucked away next to the rat race that is 15-501, something I kind of regret.

Sandy Creek Park is always a nice place. It’s fairly birdy on any given day, and most importantly it was a grand total of three minutes from my house. I never found anything totally fantastic there, but I’ve been able to find a number of nice birds there with extreme regularity, stuff like Green Heron, Prothonotary Warbler, and Wood Ducks, which are kind of hit-and-miss at my other birding locales.

Northern Parula - Sandy Creek Park, NC; 05/19/2010

One of the birds I can always find there (and most other sites I visit) are the Northern Parulas. Walk along the greenway and you can’t miss these little guys buzzing and trilling at the tops of the trees along the river like they own the place. Apparently we were in this guy’s territory because he swooped in and started scolding us for being there. No matter, he let us get really close and James got a great shot. To this day, it remains our best shot of a Northern Parula, and it’ll probably stay that way for a long time!