My year bird was Lesser Black-backed Gull and it was almost one of the first birds I saw as I entered on the north end of the refuge, but as I had my sights set on pelicans, I didn't even think to dig out the camera to record the sighting. The gull was as well a county bird, obviously for the year but also for the Ocean County life list. It was pretty obvious, a little smaller than a Great Black-backed, the mantle charcoal instead of black and the real give-away--yellow, not pink legs.
The beach seemed pretty empty after the first few hundred yards and while there were marshes on the bay side, they are not accessible, so scoping was all I could do. I did find a couple of oystercatchers on that side, and a few Semipalmated Plovers along the beach, but I was thinking that this was going to be more exercise than birding when I met Michelle B striding along the beach. Michelle is very familiar with Holgate as she gives tours there during the summer, so she knew where some of the hot spots would be. A colony of Least Terns had bred late there, she said, so late that there had been talk of delaying the Sept 1 opening of the beach. The terns weren't in the place she'd seen them but about 1/2 mile farther south. There we counted at least 8 of them, with parents feeding the demanding offspring. 8 Least Terns is what eBird calls an "unusual count" for the time and place, but 8 might be conservative. We only counted the birds we could see in one field of vision, so there may have been more flying in and out of our reference frame.
I was wearing shorts today and hadn't reckoned on biting flies being a problem, but they were--swarms of them whenever you stopped and looked down. If it hadn't been for them I probably would have walked the entire length of the beach. (You'll excuse as I stop to scratch my ankles.) As it was I turned around at marker 12, which I think meant 12000 meters, or about 2 1/4 miles. It wasn't until I turned around that I started to see significant numbers of shorebirds, especially the little wind-up toy-like Sanderlings, as well as my first Ocean County Red Knots (which at this point are mostly gray shorebirds, some with just a wash of red), along with 3 Piping Plovers and ever more Semipalmated Plovers.
I never did see pelicans, much to my frustration--if I don't find them soon I may have to wait until December in Florida to see them. I was also hoping for Royal Terns, which didn't show up either, though I did find on a bayside sandbar 2 Caspian Terns, which I was surprised to find were also missing, until today, from my county list.
So I can't complain, except for the vicious flies, about my day. There is a cold front moving in tonight; I was hoping to go to a migrant hot spot tomorrow and check for warblers but unfortunately we discovered this afternoon that one of our brake lights isn't working, so I have to take the car to garage tomorrow instead. That I can complain about.
21 species (+1 other taxa)
Double-crested Cormorant 25
Great Blue Heron 1
Great Egret 2
Osprey 2
Semipalmated Plover 35
Piping Plover 3
American Oystercatcher 9
Ruddy Turnstone 3
Red Knot 25
Sanderling 150
Laughing Gull 2
Ring-billed Gull 5
Herring Gull 500
Lesser Black-backed Gull 1
Great Black-backed Gull 250 .
Least Tern 8 @ Marker 6.
Caspian Tern 2
Common Tern 4
Sterna sp. 15
Rock Pigeon 4
Merlin 1 @ North end, in marshy area.
American Crow 4
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| Sanderlings |
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