Posted by: Jeff Wells

Today was my last chance in the north to do a dry run. The morning started cold--I actually had to pull out my winter hat and gloves! I don't know if it was the cold or the lack of wind but the birds in the grasslands seemed to become more active sooner in the day today. Unfortunately the same could not be said for the birds in the woods. A team doing a dry run about 10 minutes behind me found Purple Finches singing up a storm near the stone house while when I was there all was quiet. Later my stint at Tinsley Trail yielded not a flute from the Hermit Thrushes that I knew were there but 10 minutes later all three were happily singing for the Zeiss team's dry run.

But overall the dry run was a great success--119 species between 4:30 and 9:30 with the only real misses being Brown Creeper and Winter Wren. Tomorrow we'll probably end up finding those species and missing something else.

After the dry run, I scouted my way back north to the hotel, with last minute checks at a few spots in the hope of finding a new arrival Willow Flycatcher. By about one I was feeling tired so I laid down and closed my eyes for an hour. I couldn't sleep though as details about the route kept popping into my head. Finally at two I loaded the car, said goodbye and good luck to a few other teams who were packing up, and started driving south to meet my teammates at Derek's Dad's house. After being in the relative wilds of northwestern New Jersey it felt like a bit of a shock to race along the highway and then later to find myself stuck in long lines of traffic. But by about 5:30 we all found ourselves in Somerville.

Now as I write this, we have packed the car and the team is munching on pizza. Derek and I have a few more bits and pieces to put together and write down for our respective routes and soon we should be on our way over to Hackensack. There we have a couple of hotel rooms where we can all try to get a few hours of sleep. At 11:30 we will drive over to the nearby DeKorte Nature Center, Hopefully our contact will be there to take us over to the empty warehouse where we will start.

Thanks to Derek's Dad for his hospitality and for letting me use his computer to make this last pre-event blog entry and thanks to all of you who have been following our exploits and cheering us on!

Here we go!