There certainly is an invigoration factor birding in a good spring 
nor'easter!  Highlight for Ron Payne and me were a cluster of shorebirds 
in the bottom of a breached, retired manure lagoon 0.2 miles south of 
the Panton store.  They were somewhat out of the raucous, buffeting 
wind, and had what appeared to be some good foraging.

We tallied two sewing machine Short-billed Dowitchers, two White-rumpted 
Sandpipers, six Semipalmated Sandpipers, 27 busy Least Sandpipers, and 
two Killdeer in this one small enclosure.

Elsewhere, views of many growing ponds in cornfields with four-inch 
stalks of new corn, in Weybridge, Bridport, Addison, and Panton, yielded 
but a single Horned Lark and the occasional Red-winged Blackbird.

..................................
At one point the aerial sound of another bird from my distant past drew 
my gaze upward .... the unmistakeable dull, throaty roar of a classic 
radial airplane engine. Unbelievably, there only a couple of hundred 
feet above the treetops was the ghostly form of a 1940's Cessna 190 
clawing its way northward in slow motion in the teeth of the gale force 
winds, driving rain, ridiculously low hanging clouds, translucent mists 
and fog -- visibility was no more than a mile. Was I seeing what I was 
seeing I wondered, or just a mirage ... these were no conditions 
whatsoever to be flying in, as our shorebirds were attesting to.  Who 
might the pilot be making this journey in such trying conditions? To 
what story does this ghostly flight belong?  And just as effortlessly as 
its form emerged from the mists, those mists enveloped it again, and the 
sky returned to its quiet but for the howl of the wind.

Ian