Toms River 2/5--Killdeer, Belted Kingfisher, Brown Thrasher

Killdeer, Shelter Cove Park

I took walks in a couple of locations in Toms River I hadn't visited in quite a while, stopping first at Shelter Cove park. This is a park primarily given over to recreation that abuts the salt marsh that goes up to Cattus Island Park, but it attracts a lot of birds to its edges, beach, and underwater soccer fields. They must play some interesting matches in Toms River, because those fields are not only constantly flooded but they are also a geese magnet with the accompanying Vienna sausage-shaped goose shit all over the fields.

The geese were there, in large numbers, and mixed in among them was the bird I had hoped to find, a single Killdeer walking unperturbedly amongst the giants. The first Killdeer I ever saw in Ocean County was at this park, on a median in the parking lot and usually that is where I find them--on the drier swards that border the asphalt but I'll take 'em where I find 'em. Killdeer have been scarce this year, so far. I theorize that the extreme cold weather pushed them out--can't find little worms or bugs when the ground is either frozen or covered in snow. I also added Brown Thrasher to the year list, briefly glimpsed at the back of the park along the fence line.

Belted Kingfisher, Ocean County Parks Offices

Shelter Cove is not large enough for a good walk unless you're going to obsessively circle the fields hoping for something new, which is fine except that watching where you step gets tiresome, so after about an hour I drove up a couple of miles to the Ocean County Parks Office grounds, which is really an extension of  the trails at Cattus Island. At the boat launch, I heard, then quickly found, another bird that has been missing from the area this winter, a Belted Kingfisher. I think the weather has also moved them out of their normal spots, since diving into ice is probably not a long-term survival strategy. Now that the weather of late has been more "normal," these birds, like the Killdeer, have a chance to make a living again.

My last stop was just because I was passing by on my way home--Marshall's Pond, where I tried for the 3rd time to find the reported Cackling Goose. I looked carefully through 400 or so geese and didn't see one. Some geese were flying out, while some geese were flying in, so that may explain why a few hours later my friend Steve found the cackler. Or, it could have been there all the time and I just stink at identifying that species. But the stop wasn't a complete bust. While I had my binoculars up, scanning the geese at they floated by, I felt something pressing on my wrist. I thought I was brushing up against a tree branch. When I looked to my right, I saw that a Sharp-shinned Hawk had perched there. When it realized I was not a stump, it flew across the pond and perched in a real tree. I've never had so much as a chickadee land on me, so to find a hawk very close to my face was both exhilarating and scary.

For the morning I had 28 species, 3 year birds, and upped my Ocean County list by 5

702 Canada Goose

4 Mute Swan

2 American Black Duck

5 Black Scoter

12 Bufflehead

1 Great Blue Heron

1 Turkey Vulture

1 Sharp-shinned Hawk

1 Killdeer

10 Herring Gull

1 Great Black-backed Gull

1 Belted Kingfisher

1 Red-bellied Woodpecker

1 Downy Woodpecker

1 Northern Flicker

1 American Crow

5 Carolina Chickadee

3 Tufted Titmouse

2 White-breasted Nuthatch

4 Carolina Wren

13 American Robin

1 Brown Thrasher

1 Northern Mockingbird

5 European Starling

3 Yellow-rumped Warbler

6 Dark-eyed Junco

2 Savannah Sparrow

3 Song Sparrow