This was almost like cheating. Shari & I drove down to the Ocean City Visitors Center, on the causeway into Ocean City, to visit the heron rookery there. We hadn't added Yellow-crowned Night-Heron to our list yet in our various forays. Going to Ocean City is the birding equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. A grove of trees in the marsh hosts nesting colonies of both night-herons and since the causeway is above the trees, it is easy to see the herons roosting on the branches. It is also a photographer's dream; there were a half-dozen today with their large lenses "capturing" the birds as they flew, flapped, and postured in the branches, making me feel pretty silly with my little camera, but I only really want an illustration for the blog and documentation. (Digression: coming from a print on paper background, I'm more than a little cynical about photography viewed on computer/tablet/phone screens. Since everyone's screens are calibrated differently, even the most perfect photographs are not going to show well on the majority of media. Hence, I don't care if my photos aren't perfect, because you're not looking at what I shot anyway.)
I listed 15 of the yellow-crowns, which I knew would get flagged on eBird. Anyplace else and that would be an extraordinary number of that species. Here, it is probably an underestimate. Aside from Tricolored Heron and Green Heron, we got all the herons and egrets you'd expect to find this time of year in a saltmarsh. We were light on shorebirds, but did get Shari's favorite bird, American Oystercatcher.
After about an hour we left the colony to the burgeoning crowd of photographers and drove into Ocean City proper, heading south to the Ocean City Preserve, a nice marsh with a viewing platform. There we did pick up Green Heron and best of all, Shari found a Common Gallinule swimming with Mallards. While not a year bird, the Common Gallinule was a state bird for the year. Then we had lunch and I restrained myself from listing the House Sparrows that were on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.
We other things to do, we headed back north and home with a little list of 26 species, not counting the sparrows.
| Canada Goose |
| Mallard |
| American Black Duck |
| Great Blue Heron |
| Great Egret |
| Snowy Egret |
| Little Blue Heron |
| Green Heron |
| Black-crowned Night-Heron |
| Yellow-crowned Night-Heron |
| Glossy Ibis |
| Osprey |
| Clapper Rail |
| Common Gallinule |
| American Oystercatcher |
| Willet |
| Laughing Gull |
| Herring Gull |
| Great Black-backed Gull |
| Forster's Tern |
| Barn Swallow |
| Common Yellowthroat |
| Song Sparrow |
| Northern Cardinal |
| Red-winged Blackbird |
| Boat-tailed Grackle |
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