Lakehurst CBC 12/21--42 species

Our section for Lakehurst CBC

Shari & I participated in our first Christmas Bird Count today. I've always avoided doing them because I don't usually enjoy organized activities. In grammar school I was lucky to get a "Satisfactory" in "Works and Plays Well with Others."

But Greg P, who recently moved to the area, expressed an interest in doing a local one and I really couldn't come up with a good reason not to help out other than my report card of more than half a century ago, so we volunteered (and I volunteered Shari). We were assigned what looked to us  rather unpromising sections of Toms River and Brick Township but since the idea of CBC is to count all the birds in an area, it was a section that needed covering. Tom, the section leader for Area 4, was out earlier than we were, owling. I'm a dedicated birder, to an extent, but there was no way I was driving around Toms River at 4 A.M. The 4 of us met at the relatively decent hour of 7 A.M. (sun up today was 7:15) at Winding River Park and we were off on our adventure.

Without going into a site by site description let me just say that we pretty much covered the territory and I was surprised by both how many places Tom knew to go birding and how many species we actually managed to accumulate through the long day. There were good numbers of ducks on some of the artificial lakes in Brick, huge numbers of gulls on a big lake in Holiday City, and a surprising number of Red-tailed Hawks--it seemed like there were one or two at almost every stop we made.

The best "get" for the day was at the Ocean County Memorial Park (read: cemetery) where in among a large flock of juncos we found 4 or 5 Chipping Sparrows, birds that are rare in the area this late in the year. It took a few moments for us to get a good enough look at one of the sparrows that Greg picked out before we could see that it was an obvious chippie in winter plumage, and then, looking more closely in the grass we found a few more. I saw 4, Greg saw 5 and we were pretty pleased with ourselves.

We also got to bird in a couple of parks that were new to us: Riverwood and Winding River, and while the bird counts were not huge in either park, we did get some cool birds, including Winter Wren and Hairy Woodpecker in Riverwood, and sapsucker and my personal favorite, 3 Brown Creepers in Winding River.

A drive through one of the active adult communities looking for turkeys proved futile, but it was amusing to stop passing pedestrians and ask them if they'd seen any turkeys recently. I wanted to say, "Excuse me, but we're on official Audubon business and we'd like to know..." but I let Greg and Tom do the inquiries.

Afterwards, there was the "roundup" at Jakes Branch Park where I ran into a few birders I knew who were doing other sections of the circle. The count for the entire Lakehurst Circle was 102 species, which, I understand, is about average. We had the only Chipping Sparrows in the count. The chili they served was excellent!

I had 42 species on my list for the day and the total list for the 4 of us, including a screech owl and a woodcock Tom got long before sunrise was 46, which is not bad for a winter count when you're not near any salt water. My list:

Canada Goose

Mute Swan

American Black Duck

Mallard

Ring-necked Duck

Hooded Merganser

Ruddy Duck

Pied-billed Grebe

Great Blue Heron

Black Vulture

Turkey Vulture

Red-tailed Hawk

Ring-billed Gull

Herring Gull

Great Black-backed Gull

Rock Dove

Mourning Dove

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

Downy Woodpecker

Hairy Woodpecker

Northern Flicker

Blue Jay

American Crow

Carolina Chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

White-breasted Nuthatch

Brown Creeper

Winter Wren

Carolina Wren

Golden-crowned Kinglet

American Robin

Northern Mockingbird

European Starling

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Chipping Sparrow

Field Sparrow

Song Sparrow

Dark-eyed Junco

Northern Cardinal

House Finch 

American Goldfinch