Colliers Mills WMA 5/22--Yellow-billed Cuckoo

Colliers Mills WMA is a 13,000 acre site in the northeast corner of the Pine Barrens, about 15 miles from here. It isn't far from the farm where we found the lapwings, but the habitat couldn't be more different--many lakes, a huge pine & oak forest, grasslands, cedars swamps, and a long sand road that connect Route 539 to Route 571 about 5 miles away. I went there this morning because there are birds there that are hard to find in other places in the Pine Barrens.

The problem with the place is that it is so huge and has such varied habitat, that no matter where I am I always think I should be somewhere else. (This is not a problem restricted to birding for me) Today, I decided to stay "local." I didn't want to travel up the sand road in my two-wheel drive vehicle. So I parked  near the entrance and walked a few roads nearby for a couple of hours. In that time I found 2 new birds for my Ocean County life list--Baltimore Oriole and Indigo Bunting--and a couple of other surprises, the biggest being seeing three Yellow-billed Cuckoos within about 3 minutes. Two of them were chasing one another around in the tree tops. I've seen cuckoos in the past, but never more than one at a time. The Indigo Bunting I found atop a snag at the edge of the grasslands--I first saw a bird with the proper profile but color was  hard to determine in the morning overcast verging on fog. I lost the bird for a minute, but heard a "song" that went roughly "ti ti whee whee zeer zeer" and discovered the bird a little lower in the tangle where I was able to look at it for a long time and definitely confirm that it wasn't a Blue Grosbeak (not that that would have been bad.)

I feel that with better light and more time I could have scanned the fields and come up with Grasshopper Sparrow, meadowlarks, who knows, maybe even a Bobolink, but life was calling me away this morning, so I settled for 34 species. I'm going to try to make this a more regular stop on my birding circuit.

Canada Goose  7
Mallard  3
Great Blue Heron  1
Osprey  1
Killdeer  2
Yellow-billed Cuckoo  3
Red-bellied Woodpecker  3
Downy Woodpecker  1
Hairy Woodpecker  1
Northern Flicker  2
Eastern Wood-Pewee  5
Great Crested Flycatcher  6
Eastern Kingbird  1
Warbling Vireo  1
Blue Jay  1    Heard
American Crow  1    Heard
Purple Martin  2
Tree Swallow  3
Carolina Chickadee  2    Heard
Tufted Titmouse  1    Heard
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher  1
American Robin  9
Gray Catbird  15
Brown Thrasher  3
Ovenbird  1    Heard
Yellow Warbler  2
Eastern Towhee  1    Heard
Chipping Sparrow  3
Northern Cardinal  2    Heard
Indigo Bunting  1
Red-winged Blackbird  25
Common Grackle  5
Brown-headed Cowbird  2
Baltimore Oriole  4