Assunpink & Pole Farm 1/9--Long-eared Owl, Northern Saw-whet Owl

Northern Saw-whet Owl, Pole Farm
Photo: Mike Mandracchia

I called a wise man yesterday to find out the secret locations of a couple of owls so that Mike & I could pursue our quest for cool and/or hard to find birds. Owls qualify as both. The wise man kindly gave me directions to both owls and early this morning, after a stop at Stone Tavern Lake so that Mike could pick up Trumpeter Swan for the year (cool and hard to find), we were stomping around a conifer plantation at Assunpink, looking for owl pellets. I thought I had followed the directions accurately but we had no visuals of pellets much less the owl. Not really unexpected as these things go--you can be looking right at an owl and never see it so well camouflaged are they.

We gave up and drove west to The Pole Farm, the old AT&T facility which once had hundreds of  transmission towers for international calls but is now a Mercer County park with grasslands where the poles once stood and a little cedar grove where Building #1 used to be. In that grove, somewhere, was at least one Northern Saw-whet Owl and once again we followed the directions closely, walking past the spot where last year we saw Long-eared Owls (and couldn't find them today even though I've been told they were back in residence) and once again we couldn't find the owl. We looked in every cedar tree in the area and I was just about getting disgusted when Mike called me over. There, in a small cedar, just steps off the trail, a little higher than eye-height, was the owl. We could have reached out and petted it. Another cool and hard to find bird for the day.

It was very windy today so instead of walking back to the car the way we came, through the grasslands, we took a more circuitous route which brought us through some woods where not a bird was evident. However, we still had to walk out in the open for a while and there, in the grasslands we saw our first Eastern Meadowlarks of the year--cool but not particularly hard to find.

We made a quick stop at the Trenton Sewer Facility, where for the last few years wintering warblers have been found but unfortunately for us and the warblers, most of the thickets of vegetation have been cut down affording little cover for the birds to escape the cold. We did see a trio of Tree Swallows (neither cool nor hard to find) snagging the many little flies that were emerging from the settling basins.

Cackling Goose in front, Conine's Mill Pond
Photo: Mike Mandracchia

At Conine's Mill Pond in Allentown (we're back in Monmouth County now), there were a couple of thousand Canada Geese (certainly not hard to find) but amazingly I espied one Cackling Goose among them and more amazingly, as the flock shuffled and reshuffled I was able to refind it when we drove over to the other side of the pond. Mike was able to get a fine photo documenting what for both us was our second Cackling Goose of the year. (Cool and supposedly hard to find but I think that in every large flock of Canada Geese there is a Cackling Goose and that they are listed as rare just to keep the misidentifications down to minimum on eBird.)

When we first started scanning the pond, looking for anything other than a goose on it, I came across a couple of Common Mergansers which were FOY for me but not Mike. (Cool, but as the name implies, not hard to find.)

After a brief stop at Colliers Mills where I was able to put Bald Eagle on my Ocean County list, we were heading back to Mike's place where I'd left my car when the wise man texted me, asking if we'd seen the owls. I told him we'd batted .500. He told me he was looking at the owl we missed. I groaned, but after calling the wise man, he kindly agreed to stay in place and show us the bird. We were about 20 minutes away from Assunpink if you took the speed limits with a grain of salt and when we got there the wise man led us to the grove and entered it about 40 feet closer than we had. Ironically, I was probably standing in more or less that spot two days ago when I was looking for the owl and abandoned by search for the Pileated Woodpecker. By now you've figured out that this was the Long-eared Owl of the post's title, a very cool bird and very hard to find and see. Mike and the wise man spent 5 minutes manipulating my neck, head, and posture until the bird finally came into focus, looking, seemingly, right at me. I realized that the wise man could have put flashing lights onto the base of the tree to show us where the owl was and without his precise directions as to what angle to put my head at, I still wouldn't have found the bird. Now I have to return the favor and find the wise man a Red-headed Woodpecker at Colliers Mills.

With 5 year birds tacked onto my list we left Assunpink and headed back with enough cool birds on the day for a work week.