Island Beach SP 9/11--Yellow-headed Blackbird (County Bird)

Yellow-headed Blackbird, IBSP

There's an old saw of a birding joke where a birder wanders into a biker bar and a leather-clad biker, seeing the binoculars still hanging around the birder's neck, says to him, "Hey, you know birds, what's the name of the black bird with red wings that I'm always seeing?" And the birder responds, "That's a Red-winged Blackbird." So the biker grabs the birder by his tweed lapels and says, "What are you, an effing wise guy!"

I wonder if out west, Yellow-headed Blackbird is substituted, since its common name is equally, simplistically descriptive. Even its Latin name, Xantocephalus xantocephalus, is pretty simple: Genus: Yellowhead. Species: Yellowhead.

All this is prompted by my first Ocean County Yellow-headed Blackbird, a bird that is rare in New Jersey and practically unheard of this far north--they tend to be found either on cattle farms in Salem County or on the dikes at Brig.

It has not been an easy week so far; I've had to travel up to Rahway the last couple of days, spending time in the hospital with my mother, so when I got home late yesterday afternoon and saw the alert about the bird, I told myself I had bigger problems and didn't rush over to the gatehouse at Island Beach. I figured the bird wouldn't last past yesterday, and even if it did, I still had to go back north sometime today. I was at Whitesbog very early in the morning, doing a morning walk, when practically at the same time an alert came in that the blackbird was still persisting and a call came from my brother that my mother wouldn't be available until late in the afternoon. So I drove over to the park.

When I got there I was surprise at what a chintzy feeder the bird was visiting. Or had been visiting, since it was nowhere in sight. I was standing there, figuring I had nothing better to do, when Greg came around the gatehouse and asked if I had seen the bird because it had just flushed when he drove in. Of course, I hadn't. Typical. If I had been driving in, instead of parking outside and walking in, I'd have seen the bird.

There was a startling amount of traffic going into the park on a Wednesday morning in September--the last gasp of summer I suppose, and the ten or so blackbirds I had seen had flown to the west side of the road, so I decided to look in the high reeds over there. As I was walking around the median I saw the blackbird flying--no mistaking that yellow head--but, even though I could have declared victory, I wanted a more than fleeting look at this handsome bird--males seem even more rare than youngsters or females--so I walked along the road until suddenly the bird flew in, teed itself up on a dead branch and posed for me for as long as I wanted to take pictures. (This bird, I think, is a first year male, since it isn't completely yellow on the face and head.)

Slightly larger than a Red-winged Blackbird

I then drove up to Reed's Road and spent about an hour and half walking there--not much of note in the hot mid-morning. Highlights were a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, a couple of kingfishers, and an immature Magnolia Warbler. As I was driving out I saw Mike approaching the gatehouse, so I hung with him for a while but the bird didn't reappear until a couple of hours later. Happily, persistence paid off for Mike