Great Bay Blvd 4/4--Wrong!

In retrospect, it is obvious that these are Sanderlings, but this morning, from hundreds of yards away, peering into the sun glare, I was convinced I had very early Semipalmated Sandpipers and listed them on eBird. What fooled me, mostly, was habitat. I hardly ever seen Sanderlings just sitting on a sandbar, pecking away at   the water. I'm used to seeing them run like little wind up toys up and down a beach, zigzagging away from the surf as it rolls up the beach. Plus, the bills looked too thick. Color was hard to judge, but I didn't see any gray shoulders. On the other hand, when I got home and did a little more research, I realized that, while size is hard to judge from a distance, by comparison to the Dunlins (that's a Dunlin butt to the right, I believe) that were also on the beach they were too big to be semis.  Sam Galick, the eBird reviewer for Ocean County, gently corrected me. I'm a little embarrassed but I also know I learned something today. I'm also impressed I got such good pictures digiscoping. Those sandpipers were far away.

Another example of digiscoping was my Bird A Day entry: American Kestrel. This little lady was sitting on a wire just at the end of the road when I was coming back from the inlet's beach.

There was a great deal of public works activity on Great Bay Blvd today, which I was happy to see. Crews had come along and pulled huge amounts of junk out of the marshes and put it on the side of the road for collection (I hope). Most of it, I suppose was debris from Sandy, but a lot of it was just litter from slobs. This was the most colorful garbage there.

I had 22 species in 2 1/2 hours of walking up down the road and the beach at low-tide. Very few ducks and a couple of loons were all that was in the water. Lots of grackles periodically rising out of the reeds to roost on the wires and form a very complicated musical composition, for those of  you who remember Steve Allen's routine.
Brant  145
American Black Duck  2
Red-breasted Merganser  7
Common Loon  2
Great Egret  6
Snowy Egret  1
Turkey Vulture  1
Osprey  2
American Oystercatcher  7
Sanderling  3    
Dunlin  4
Herring Gull  50
Great Black-backed Gull  10
Mourning Dove  1
Belted Kingfisher  1
American Kestrel  1    
Fish Crow  2
European Starling  3
Song Sparrow  4
Red-winged Blackbird  15
Common Grackle  3
Boat-tailed Grackle  200

Great Bay Inlet, low tide