Neotropic Cormorant

[millipede]

I was bird watching with my oldest daughter at a place called Eagle Watch Nature Trail at Swepco Lake. This lake is where a power plant is located but it is a great place to view nature. Lots of migrating birds visit there each year... of course, the Bald Eagle is one of them(hence the name). The Eagles are there mostly in the winter time but, you can find a variety of other birds there throughout the year.
While there I noticed 3 Cormorants perched on logs/branches in the water. I did notice that one was smaller than the others and I thought maybe... just maybe it was a neotropic. People have been reporting them in this part of Arkansas. I wasn't more certain until later on after I got home and looked at the pictures... You can clearly see the difference in size and the smaller one has a longer tail.
It turns out that some other people(including some that know their birds better than I) saw the neotropic there the very same day. I got a report about them from Ebird. This confirmed it for me.

Here are some pictures of the cormorants posted on BYF's facebook page

In this one ^^^ you can see the size difference I mentioned...






This last one ^^^ was by itself, separate from the other two.

On this day, my daughter and I spotted the following:

• 3 Blue Jays
  4 Indigo Buntings
  3 Turkey Vultures
  5 European Starlings
  3 Gold Finches
  6 Northern Cardinals
  2 Red-Bellied Woodpeckers
  1 Ruby Throated Hummingbird
  2 Northern Mockingbirds
  2 Brown Thrashers
  3 American Robins
  4 Eastern Bluebirds
  20 Red-winged Blackbirds
  2 Yellow-billed Cuckoos
  1 Eastern Kingbird
  1 Pileated Woodpecker
  3 Killdeer
  7 Great Egrets(a first for my daughter)
  1 Belted Kingfisher
  5 Great Blue Herons
  2 Baltimore Orioles
  1 Little Blue Heron(A first for both of us)
  2 Carolina Wrens
  3 Purple Martins
  1 Chimney Swift
  1 Black-and-white Warbler
  2 Green Herons
  1 Common Grackle
  1 Scissor Tailed Flycatcher
  1 Red-tailed Hawk
  2 Double Crested Cormorants
  1 Neotropic Cormorant(a first for both of us)

[Nicki]

Y'all spotted a lot of birds in one day!!! I've never even heard of a Neotropic Cormorant before LOL

[millipede]

I think our biggest list for one day was more than 40 species.
Before this year, I had not heard of them either as we just recently got more serious about bird watching... I knew of the double-crested cormorant because I had seen them before... and, I've seen a few hundred of them this fall already... but that one neotropic just hung out at that lake all summer. Didn't quite belong there but that's what makes it so interesting.