October's Birds

FOS Ring-necked Ducks, Butterfly Bogs

It was not a terribly "productive" month with only 4 year birds added, 3 of them, not surprisingly, sparrows. Naturally, as the year progresses, it gets harder to add birds to the list, but there are autumn birds being reported that I'm not seeing, foremost, Nelson's Sparrow, which I again looked for on Sunday with no luck. Some have the theory that they are best found at high tide  because they are pushed up into the grass (yesterday disproved that) while I think they're easier to see at low tide, when there is more area for them to run around and feed, though last week's low tide coincided with a stiff breeze and that keeps them down.

Anyway, the only true rarity of the month came very early, 2 American White Pelicans at mostly-closed Brig. I found a Lincoln's Sparrow at Island Beach, and on separate trips to Great Bay Blvd, a Clay-colored Sparrow and a Vesper Sparrow.

Here are the birds, in no particular order, that I would have like to have found this month:
Nelson's Sparrow
Lark Sparrow
Snow Bunting
Lapland Longspur
American Pipit

Now that hunting season is upon, finding places to walk and bird can get problematical. Colliers Mills scares me; Assunpink, for some reason, I feel safe at, but the gun fire is annoying. Supposedly there's hunting at Whitesbog, but I've never seen it, but, this time of year, there aren't many birds there either. Today, to end the month, I took a 5 mile walk around the perimeter of Manasquan Reservoir, which was fairly birdy (though I only added American Coot to the month list) and it is to places like that I'll have to turn my attentions to until the shooting stops.

Solitary Sandpiper at a rarely visited pond in Colliers Mills

For the month I managed 140 species. All the birding was in NJ except for a brief foray on Staten Island during one of the very many trips I made accompanying a loved one to a doctor.
Counties birded:
New Jersey: Atlantic, Burlington, Monmouth, Ocean
New York: Richmond

Species   Location

Brant   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Canada Goose   Horicon Lake

Mute Swan   Brig

Wood Duck   Whitesbog

Gadwall   Brig

American Wigeon   Marshall's Pond

American Black Duck   Sandy Hook

Mallard   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Blue-winged Teal   Cranberry Bogs--Dover Rd

Green-winged Teal   Forsythe--Barnegat

Ring-necked Duck   Butterfly Bogs

Greater Scaup   Bamber Lake

Surf Scoter   Island Beach SP

White-winged Scoter   Island Beach SP

Black Scoter   Island Beach SP

Hooded Merganser   Bamber Lake

Ruddy Duck   Assunpink WMA

Wild Turkey   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Red-throated Loon   Island Beach SP

Common Loon   Island Beach SP

Pied-billed Grebe   Assunpink WMA

Northern Gannet   Island Beach SP

Great Cormorant   Island Beach SP

Double-crested Cormorant   Horicon Lake

American White Pelican   Brig

Brown Pelican   Island Beach SP

Great Blue Heron   Horicon Lake

Great Egret   Whitesbog

Snowy Egret   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Tricolored Heron   Island Beach SP

Green Heron   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Black-crowned Night-Heron   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Yellow-crowned Night-Heron   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Black Vulture   35 Sunset Rd

Turkey Vulture   Wawa Rt 70 & CR 530

Osprey   Sandy Hook

Northern Harrier   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Sharp-shinned Hawk   Crestwood Village

Cooper's Hawk   Sandy Hook

Bald Eagle   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Red-tailed Hawk   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Common Gallinule   Brig

American Coot   Manasquan Reservoir IBA

American Oystercatcher   Island Beach SP

Black-bellied Plover   Sandy Hook

Semipalmated Plover   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Killdeer   Field next to Lakewood Wawa

Marbled Godwit   Holgate

Sanderling   Island Beach SP

Dunlin   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Least Sandpiper   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Semipalmated Sandpiper   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Solitary Sandpiper   Colliers Mills WMA

Greater Yellowlegs   Whitesbog

Willet   Holgate

Bonaparte's Gull   Island Beach SP

Laughing Gull   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Ring-billed Gull   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Herring Gull   Whitesbog

Lesser Black-backed Gull   Holgate

Great Black-backed Gull   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Caspian Tern   Holgate

Forster's Tern   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Royal Tern   Island Beach SP

Rock Pigeon   Robert Wood Johnson Hospital Rahway

Mourning Dove   35 Sunset Rd

Yellow-billed Cuckoo   Sandy Hook

Black-billed Cuckoo   Cattus Island County Park

Chimney Swift   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Belted Kingfisher   Whitesbog

Red-bellied Woodpecker   Whitesbog

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Downy Woodpecker   Whitesbog

Hairy Woodpecker   Assunpink WMA

Northern Flicker   Crestwood Village

American Kestrel   Island Beach SP

Merlin   Brig

Peregrine Falcon   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Eastern Wood-Pewee   Sandy Hook

Eastern Phoebe   Island Beach SP

Blue-headed Vireo   Assunpink WMA

Philadelphia Vireo   Sandy Hook

Warbling Vireo   Sandy Hook

Red-eyed Vireo   Sandy Hook

Blue Jay   35 Sunset Rd

American Crow   Whitesbog

Fish Crow   Crestwood Village

Common Raven   Sandy Hook

Tree Swallow   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Carolina Chickadee   35 Sunset Rd

Black-capped Chickadee   Sandy Hook

Tufted Titmouse   Whitesbog

Red-breasted Nuthatch   Whitesbog

White-breasted Nuthatch   Whitesbog

Brown Creeper   Island Beach SP

House Wren   Crestwood Village

Carolina Wren   35 Sunset Rd

Golden-crowned Kinglet   Island Beach SP

Ruby-crowned Kinglet   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Eastern Bluebird   Colliers Mills WMA

Hermit Thrush   Island Beach SP

American Robin   Crestwood Village

Gray Catbird   Whitesbog

Brown Thrasher   Horicon Lake

Northern Mockingbird   Horicon Lake

European Starling   DaVita-Woodbridge

Cedar Waxwing   Sandy Hook

Ovenbird   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Black-and-white Warbler   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Common Yellowthroat   Whitesbog

American Redstart   Sandy Hook

Magnolia Warbler   Island Beach SP

Yellow Warbler   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Blackpoll Warbler   Sandy Hook

Black-throated Blue Warbler   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

Palm Warbler   Brig

Pine Warbler   Whitesbog

Yellow-rumped Warbler   Whitesbog

Prairie Warbler   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Black-throated Green Warbler   Island Beach SP

Chipping Sparrow   35 Sunset Rd

Clay-colored Sparrow   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Field Sparrow   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Dark-eyed Junco   Island Beach SP

White-crowned Sparrow   Sandy Hook

White-throated Sparrow   Island Beach SP

Vesper Sparrow   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Savannah Sparrow   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Song Sparrow   Horicon Lake

Lincoln's Sparrow   Island Beach SP

Swamp Sparrow   Whitesbog

Eastern Towhee   35 Sunset Rd

Northern Cardinal   35 Sunset Rd

Red-winged Blackbird   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Common Grackle   Butterfly Bogs

Boat-tailed Grackle   Great Bay Bvld. WMA

Brown-headed Cowbird   Palmyra Cove Nature Park

House Finch   35 Sunset Rd

American Goldfinch   Brig

House Sparrow   Palmyra Cove Nature Park Black Vultures on our roof

Great Bay Blvd 10/23--Vesper Sparrow

After being confined to quarters for the last day and a half by wind & rain (a Friday morning trip to Sandy Hook was aborted when the showers started much earlier than predicted), I took a run down to Tuckerton, despite knowing that the wind was not going to abate. I was hoping against hope for a Nelson's Sparrow at the inlet, but Nelson's Sparrow (in fact, most birds) like me, don't like wind. So while I managed to find one sparrow running in the grass, whether it was a Nelson's or a Saltmarsh is up in the air because it quickly hunkered down and wasn't coming out.

However, at the little grove of trees just before the beach at the end of the road, I espied, briefly, a largish sparrow, streaked on the breast, with an eye ring like a whitewall tire--Vesper Sparrow. It quickly dived down into the foliage and would not come up again, but this is the time of the year for these birds and Great Bay Blvd is the place I go for my (relatively) rare sparrows.

Usually I walk the road from the inlet up to the first wooden bridge (about 1.7 miles) then back, but with the wind today that seemed like it would be unpleasant. So, looking for someplace protected, I drove up to Stafford Forge WMA and walked in the woods, where there was very little in the trees and nothing in the water. I did, however, see a pheasant in the field. Unfortunately, pheasants are stocked there so it is uncountable. Too bad. Going by my idiosyncratic (or idiotic) counting rules, if I see a pheasant outside a WMA, like on the side of the road, I'll count it, figuring it is now "wild," whereas, if I know a bird is stocked in a WMA, I won't.

By far, the greatest number of a single species today was Boat-tailed Grackle. A conservative estimate would be 250. The picture below is just a sampling of the flock that was on the mud flats off the 2nd wooden bridge at dead low tide.


My wind-blown list for Great Bay Blvd:
17 species
Brant  50
American Black Duck  10
Double-crested Cormorant  25
Great Blue Heron  4
Great Egret  35
Black-crowned Night-Heron  3
Northern Harrier  1
Black-bellied Plover  3
Semipalmated Plover  2
Dunlin  1
Greater Yellowlegs  1
Herring Gull  25
Great Black-backed Gull  10
European Starling  40
Yellow-rumped Warbler  10
Vesper Sparrow  1
Boat-tailed Grackle  250

Holgate 10/19--Marbled Godwit

Marbled Godwits, interspersed among American Oystercatchers & Brants, Holgate

Since year birds are getting sparse this time of year and so are the entries, I'm turning to a state & county year bird for today's post. When I was last at Holgate at the extreme southern end of the aptly named Long Beach Island, it was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit with a ferocious wind in my face, but, I really wanted to see a Snowy Owl. Today, the 2nd day of an October heat wave, seemed like a good time to make the long, boring drive to Holgate and walk on the beach to look for Marbled Godwits.  In my "hey kids, collect 'em all" frame of mind, I "needed" these birds for the state and Ocean County lists, despite having them on the year list from trip to Delaware. 

They weren't hard to find. There were at least 14 of them sitting on a sand bar on the bay side with about 75 American Oystercatchers and a slew of Brants.  If you examine my digiscoped pictures, you'll see them tucked in among the orange beaks of the oystercatchers. 

Marbled Godwits are supposedly rare in the county, but they're really not. Travelers to Great Sedge Island see them a on regular basis and this group has been at Holgate for seemingly a month. True, you can't go just anywhere to see them, but it isn't really that big a deal to find them--unless you "need" them. Then you trudge out on the sand. 

Holgate seemed a lot different to me than my last warm weather visit. The "Area Closed" signs have been moved much closer to the beach, the numbered markers that gave you some idea of how far you'd walked have been removed, and maybe it was just because the tide was high, but the whole strip seemed to me much more narrow, as if storms had eroded the beach. 

I added a few other month birds along the way: Caspian Tern, a couple of Lesser Black-backed Gulls (this is a reliable spot for them) and a Western Willet. There was a Black-bellied Plover also, although at the distance I had it, it could have been an American Golden-Plover but the operative word in this sentence is "distance." 

I guess I walked about 2/3 of the way down the beach before turning around when the beach ahead just looked like more gulls. There was nothing on the ocean in the way of sea ducks, loons, grebes, or gannets. 

23 species
Brant  200     Bayside
American Black Duck  8
Double-crested Cormorant  100
Great Blue Heron  2
Great Egret  2
American Oystercatcher  75     Close count
Black-bellied Plover  1
Semipalmated Plover  25     Exact count
Marbled Godwit  18     Exact count.  Digiscope photo below.

Sanderling  500     Easily
Dunlin  3
Willet (Western)  1
Laughing Gull  8
Ring-billed Gull  30
Herring Gull  100
Lesser Black-backed Gull  2
Great Black-backed Gull  200
Caspian Tern  1
Northern Mockingbird  1
European Starling  10
Yellow-rumped Warbler  6
Song Sparrow  2
Boat-tailed Grackle  2

Great Bay Blvd WMA 10/11--Clay-colored Sparrow

Last week I mentioned that I was giving warblers a couple of more days before I switched over to sparrows. Trips to Palmyra and Sandy Hook yielded a few warblers, but no big numbers. Sparrows though, after this rainy weekend, were abundant at Island Beach yesterday (along with Yellow-rumped Warblers, which I consider honorary sparrows), particularly White-throated Sparrows, which were present in the hundreds.

Savannah Sparrow

It was windy yesterday but today calmer, so I took a ride down to Great Bay Blvd hoping that the conditions would keep the sparrows from huddling in the reeds and grasses. At my favorite sparrow spot, just before the 2nd wooden bridge, there were mostly juncos with a Savannah Sparrow, a juvie White-throated Sparrow, a few Song Sparrows, a towhee, Chipping Sparrows, and best of all, my FOY Clay-colored Sparrow, just as I was hoping (I've seen one in this spot before). I couldn't get a picture of the Clay-colored. The Savannah will have to do.

I was hoping that the inlet would produce Nelson's Sparrow, the close cousin of the much more numerous Saltmarsh Sparrow which can usually be found running around like mice in grasses, but despite two walks along the beach I couldn't find any today. Last week, when it was windy, I saw a lot of sparrows diving for cover as I approached; none of them stayed in view long enough to determine species. I didn't even have that frustration today. Still, Clay-colored is a good one and a species I might not get for the rest of the year.

For the day I had 40 or so species. I tried mightily to determine whether the dowitchers I found were Short-billed or Long-billed, but distance and movement were against me.
40 species (+1 other taxa)
Brant  15 (a sure sign that winter is near)
Mute Swan  5
American Black Duck  2
Double-crested Cormorant  30
Great Blue Heron  10
Great Egret  25
Tricolored Heron  1
Black-crowned Night-Heron  10
Bald Eagle  1
Black-bellied Plover  8
Dunlin  4
Short-billed/Long-billed Dowitcher  2
Greater Yellowlegs  10
Laughing Gull  10
Ring-billed Gull  2
Herring Gull  25
Great Black-backed Gull  6
Forster's Tern  5
Northern Flicker  3
Merlin  1
Eastern Phoebe  5
Brown Creeper  1
Carolina Wren  1     Heard
Golden-crowned Kinglet  4
Gray Catbird  1     Heard
European Starling  75
Palm Warbler  2
Pine Warbler  1
Yellow-rumped Warbler  75
Chipping Sparrow  4
Clay-colored Sparrow  1
Dark-eyed Junco  20
White-crowned Sparrow  1
Savannah Sparrow  1
Song Sparrow  6
Swamp Sparrow  2
Eastern Towhee  1
Northern Cardinal  4
Boat-tailed Grackle  80
House Finch  1
American Goldfinch  1

Island Beach SP 10/5--Lincoln's Sparrow

Yet another dreary day, overcast, cool, windy. Memo to self: Get over it; summer's done.

To drive home that notion, we've switched in migration from warblers to sparrows, at least around here. I was at Island Beach today and saw exactly 1 warbler I could identify: Black-throated Green Warbler. On Reed's Road I saw my first juncos of the fall, along with White-throated Sparrow. There were more sparrows on the Spizzle Creek trail, and like yesterday on Great Bay Blvd, they were winning at the game of hide and seek. They don't seem too interested in being pished out either.

However, I did score one year bird sparrow. At the "T" of the trail there was some activity: chickadees, the now ubiquitous Red-breasted Nuthatches, a phoebe and couple of sparrows. One of the birds was a Song Sparrow, no big deal, but the other was different, smaller, with a buffy wash on the breast and a thin eye-ring. Lincoln's Sparrow. Not unexpected in migration, and one of those birds I probably see more often than I think and just let them go as Songs, but this one, being right next to a Song Sparrow, stood out and grabbed my attention. Despite hanging around the little thicket the birds were in for 10 minutes and then leaving and returning and hanging around another 5 minutes, and pishing, neither the Song or the Lincoln's (or that matter the phoebe, the nuthatch, or chickadee) reappeared. Very frustrating and thus no photo.

Other minor highlights of the day were 3 Tricolored Herons (getting late, I suspect) at Spizzle, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet on Reed's Road, a Golden-crowned Kinglet on Two Bit Road, and my FOS Brown Creeper, the first bird I saw on Reed's Road.

The next couple of days I'm going to make a push for warblers and then mentally switch over to sparrows, waterfowl and lingering shorebirds.

Brig 10/4--American White Pelican

American White Pelicans

I didn't think I'd be going back to Brig so soon; I figured I'd wait for its "grand re-opening" but a text alert came in while I was walking on Great Bay Blvd that two American White Pelicans were viewable from the Gull Tower and since GBB was, according to GPS, only 37 minutes away and since pelicans are big birds and hard to miss, I drove down there. I wouldn't chase a flighty bird like a warbler or sparrow, but this seemed like a pretty good bet.

And it was. I climbed up the tower, met a couple of guys there who pointed me in the general direction of the pelicans, looked through my scope and added them to the year list. I was figuring that was a species that would be a miss this year.

Almost as interesting to me as the pelicans were the 6 Common Gallinules that were in the Gull Pond. (Gallinula galeata use to be called Common Moorhen but since half of them aren't hens and there are no moors in North America, the name was, to my mind, sensibly changed, though much to the chagrin of some traditionalists. On a somewhat related note, the Toledo Mudhens minor league baseball team, uses the folk name for American Coot. The team doesn't seem to know this and its mascot looks more like a chicken than a coot.) While Common Gallinule is not rare this time of year at Brig, 6 of them is a pretty big number to find. These all looked like either females or juveniles to me.

Common Gallinule

For the 6th day in a row, the weather was nasty--blowing drizzle, gusting winds, but not enough to prevent me from getting out to bird. Great Bay Blvd had a decent variety of birds, but, the ones I was looking for, sparrows, were being extraordinarily difficult, showing themselves for a fleeting moment before diving into the reeds. The dim light and windy conditions didn't help, so I couldn't tell if the sparrows scampering around the marsh were Saltmarsh or Nelson's. Nelson's is the one I need for the year and GBB is the best place in Ocean County to find them.

Some other birds I did see down there:

Dunlin

Least Sandpiper

Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (juvenile)

You can see how murky the light was today. Tomorrow might be better. Then we're awaiting a hurricane to decide on its path.