BC Fairgrounds 8/21--American Golden-Plover

"Sod-farming" is not my favorite style of birding. It consists of standing on the side of busy roads in Monmouth and Mercer Counties, scanning clods of dirt on the various Reed Sod Farms scattered through those counties. Once in a blue moon you find a "grasspiper." Most times you see a lot of Killdeer and starlings, while big trucks sweep behind you and cars honk their horns because they can. There is little walking involved. You won't build up a big list. There is always a haze on the fields and sun glare in your eyes. What's not to like?

But I do it every year because...you just might get lucky. Yesterday's episode with Mike started out with us thinking we had, then became a disappointment, and was finally rescued on the grounds of a former sod farm.

If I'm going to sod farm, my favorite spot to do it is on Rt 526 Spur, using the parking lot of the Reed Recreation Area as my viewing spot and looking across the road to the farm. While there is often the blur of a speeding vehicle in your scope's eyepiece, you are at least not right in the line of traffic. That was our second stop of the morning, the first farm, across from the White Birch Farm, being a haven for starlings and nothing else.

Horned Lark
Photo: Mike Mandracchia

I'd seen a few birds moving int he torn up dirt, so we set up our scopes and they weren't the Least Sandpipers I thought they might be, but instead were "land birds." They were hard to see, since they kept disappearing behinds hunks of dirt and the lighting was terrible, but we could clearly see white bellies, wing bars, and a facial pattern that suggested a sparrow-like bird. There aren't a lot of birds that like that kind of barren habitat--larks, pipits, and longspurs are about the only ones. We knew they weren't pipits, they sure didn't look like larks to us, McCown's Longspur would be an astonishing rarity and they didn't look like that species either, so we defaulted to another somewhat less rare rarity--Lapland Longspur.

We were pretty excited, but we didn't put out an alert (thanks be to caution) because while the birds looked convincing they weren't 100%. We ran up to the farm on Herbert Road where we ran into our friend Bob D and told him about our find. He turned around and drove down there. We were just pulling into the Mercer Corporate Park (nothing) when he called and said all he saw were Horned Larks. We drove back there as he was leaving, scoped the field again, and did indeed find one obvious Horned Lark. The birds we had been seeing weren't in sight.  Looking at the lark with its yellow breast and black collar only convinced us that our original ID was correct.

It wasn't until we got to the BC Fairgrounds that we got shot down. Mike had sent a picture to Scott who said, basically, nope, lark. What a let down! I get birds wrong all the time, but to be so far off makes me cringe. And it still doesn't really look like a lark to me--must be immature or a female.

I got the bad news from Mike while I was scanning the mowed field beyond the parking lot at the fairgrounds. Those fields use to be called the Mercer Sod Farm, so technically we were still sod farming. We'd come there because an American Golden-Plover had been reported. Now, this is not the place I want my golden-plover. I want it in Whitesbog. Mike is not so fussy.

I moving my scope west to east: Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer, Killdeer...I was up to 55 Killdeers when I finally hit "not a Killdeer" and found the plover. Mike quickly got on the bird. Too far out for photography. We spend a lot of time looking at this plover. Didn't want to get burned again. But it was a no doubter. There had been 3 Upland Sandpipers in the field for the last week or so but only one remained. Whether 2 had flown out and one straggler stayed, or 3 had flown out and this was a replacement is impossible to say. You only need one. Just for fun, Mike kept counting Killdeers. He ended up with 120. Sounds like a lot until you hear that someone else counted 192.

With that we gave up on sod farming and on the way home, stopped in at Bunker Hill Bogs, which, we happy to find, is now passable. It seems like for almost a year the trails were flooded, but we had no problems walking the length of the trail from the parking to Butterfly Road and back. We accumulated 31 species, including 5 species of warblers (yellowthroat, pine, redstart, Ovenbird, Black-and-White), which is not bad for mid-day, mid-summer.