Point Pleasant Beach 3/28--Laughing Gull

It has been getting silly just to find something new... Yesterday, as I was driving around, I looked in every Wawa parking lot I passed, I looked in the parking lot of the Barnegat Municipal Dock, I scanned the skies while stopped at traffic lights along Route 9 and still never found what I wanted, which was a Laughing Gull. Ridiculous, because pretty soon they'll be here, there, and everywhere, eating French fries on the beach, swooping through the Costco parking lot, defecating on cars all along the east coast, but my chronic impatience, fueled by my boredom with winter weather which has lingered into spring, wanted one now. Bad enough that I keep missing Black-headed Gull in the county, now I couldn't find a Laughing Gull?

Finally today, after walking around the Manasquan River WMA in yet another fruitless effort to find a towhee (a bird that will, sooner than later, be nesting in my very own backyard), I drove the circuitous route from Brick down to Baltimore Avenue in Point Pleasant Beach and there, viewing over the cruddy slip to the sandbar (thankfully, the tide was low), I saw a few dozen standard issue gulls with one Laughing Gull, standing aloof from the flock. Would it fly closer to where I stood so that I might take a decent picture of it? No it would not. Fine. Put it on the list and stop thinking about them for the rest of the year.

Speaking of the backyard, at least activity there is picking up. In the last couple of days we've had our first Fox Sparrow of the year there (getting late for this species), our first Common Grackle of the year, a couple of Pine Warblers scarfing down Shari's gourmet suet, and this afternoon, while she was sitting on the patio, our first backyard turkeys of the year casually walked by her and started picking at the dirt beneath the feeders. Two Red-breasted Nuthatches are still hanging around too. All this makes for interesting entries into my Feederwatch log.

Pine Warbler

Wild Turkey displaying

Fox Sparrow

Common Grackle