Long Beach Island 1/13--Harlequin Ducks, Tricolored Heron

Barnegat Light SP Jetty

I went solo on a field trip to Long Beach Island today. That jetty in the state park does not appeal to Shari. Can't blame her: today one of our party slipped off the rocks getting down to the beach, fortunately harming neither himself nor his optics and I found myself standing on a wet, slippery boulder, unable to get any traction and just this side of panic until someone lent me a  hand.

The weather report was for unseasonably warm weather: Good. Unseasonably warm weather in winter often brings fog: Bad. We spent a lot of our time as if we were looking into milk.

We still managed to glean some good birds, both in the inlet and on the ocean, the highlight of the inlet being my second Razorbill this weekend.

The main attraction of the jetty of course, is Harlequin Ducks. From the concrete walkway we got decent but distant scope views. Later, after taking the long way around to avoid rock-hopping our way to the end of the jetty we got the "field guide" looks at the these handsome ducks as the tide took them right by us as if they were promenading before us.

The disappointment today was no sandpipers--no Purple Sandpipers, no turnstones, no Dunlins, no Sanderlings. And they weren't obscured by the fog either.

Barnegat Light SP
22 species
Brant  20
American Black Duck  1
Common Eider  35
Harlequin Duck  3   
Black Scoter  1
Long-tailed Duck  3
Red-breasted Merganser  15
Red-throated Loon  1
Common Loon  10
Double-crested Cormorant  3
Cooper's Hawk  1
American Oystercatcher  4
Ring-billed Gull  200
Herring Gull  5
Great Black-backed Gull  10
Razorbill  1
American Crow  2
Red-breasted Nuthatch  1    Heard
Northern Mockingbird  1
European Starling  25
Yellow-rumped Warbler  2
House Sparrow  20

After a while the fog lifted and the sun briefly came out before it just became an overcast winter day. We were hoping for some "interesting" gulls or "interesting" finches, but found none. We then went a few blocks west to the bay side and stopped at a couple of spots there. We were most interested in seeing if we could find the Tricolored Heron that had been reported off and on for a few weeks. At the first stop, a marina, Scott Barnes, who was leading the trip, found not one, but two TRHE flying off toward a marsh called high bar. I saw them, but I couldn't in good conscience count them as they were really too distant for me to identify them on my own. There was one FOY here for me--a single Boat-tailed Grackle, which was soon joined on its wire by a several Red-winged Blackbirds. It's unusual to see just one of this gregarious species, but oddly, last year, my first boat-tailed was a singleton at the Bridge to Nowhere. 
Bayview Marina
13 species
Brant  25
Canada Goose  40
Mallard  10
Red-breasted Merganser  5
Red-throated Loon  1
Common Loon  2
Ring-billed Gull  X
Herring Gull  2
Rock Pigeon  12
American Crow  3
Red-winged Blackbird  25
Boat-tailed Grackle  1
House Finch  20

Our final stop was a few blocks south at a park on the bay. Almost as soon as we parked a Tricolored Heron (a third? or one of the pair circling back?) flew by us and landed in close by marsh where it proceeded to snap up little fish or eels with great rapidity. We walked along the beach there for a hundred yards or so and along the rack line one of our sharper-eyed birders found us a Palm Warlber feeding with a Song Sparrow. 
Bayview Ave Park
9 species
Canada Goose  X
American Black Duck  5
Bufflehead  20
Tricolored Heron  1   
Ring-billed Gull  X
Herring Gull  X
Palm Warbler  1
Song Sparrow  1
House Finch  20
For the day I finished with 32 species and 6 FOY. Not bad, considering I spent almost as much time cleaning mist off my glasses, binoculars and scope and did looking through them.