Horicon Lake 2/22--American Woodcock

I have on my calendar a list of places I took from Howard Boyd's A Pine Barrens Odyssey where in early March we should check for woodcock courtship displays--Whitesbog, Atison, Medford. I guess we have to add Horicon Lake, much closer to home, to that list, because today I found an American Woodcock in among the tangles across the road from the lake. A couple of days ago in the same spot I flushed a bird and my first reaction was snipe, but it disappeared into the underbrush. Today I was lucky enough to come upon the bird and not scare it--I saw its big eye, the cryptic coloration, the long beak as it inched slowly away from me, walking under a bush and vanishing. Despite looking for 20 minutes, I never saw the bird again. If you look at where it hid, it isn't hard to see why I had no luck:

The last woodcock I saw was in Prospect Park about 2 1/2 years ago--I flushed that one on a hill--not a very satisfactory look. Before that we stopped one early evening in Cape May at the Beanery and watched 3 woodcocks go through their whirling, "peenting" courtship aerial dance. So I'm excited to have finally found one so close to home.

Earlier in the day--much earlier, Shari had to make a 6:45 bus to NY so I was looking at ducks as the sun came up--I stopped at Riverfront Landing. The usual ducks were floating among the piers, but I never get tired of looking at Canvasbacks.

After 15 minutes there I drove over to Double Trouble State Park to take my morning walk. The big surprise there was finding a couple of flocks of Tundra Swans on the bogs and on the lakes. I saw my first Ocean County Tundra Swans on Sunday at Colliers Mills WMA. There's no essential difference between the bogs at Double Trouble and the bogs at Whitesbog, yet Whitesbog is the "go to" hot spot for Tundra Swans in this area. Curious.

For the day, at the 3 sites, I had 25 species:

Canada Goose    175

Tundra Swan    30

Mallard    28

Canvasback    40

Ring-necked Duck    30

Greater Scaup    2

Lesser Scaup    15

Bufflehead    6

Hooded Merganser    5

Ruddy Duck    11

Pied-billed Grebe    1

American Woodcock    1

Ring-billed Gull    20

Rock Pigeon    1

Mourning Dove    1

Red-bellied Woodpecker    1

Hairy Woodpecker    2

American Crow    1

Tufted Titmouse    2

Carolina Wren    1

Song Sparrow    1

White-throated Sparrow    4

Dark-eyed Junco    20

Northern Cardinal    1

House Sparrow    15