Palmyra Cove Nature Park 11/30--Pacific-slope Flycatcher

Pacific-slope Flycatcher

I got up early.

I gritted my teeth.

I girded my loins.

I gassed up the car.

I was going to Palmyra.

Palmyra Nature Cove Park, on the banks of the Delaware, is a terrific birding spot but it is a royal pain for me to get to, a long ride on Rt 70 and then north on Rt 73 with its constant traffic lights along an increasingly ugly industrial corridor as you near the river. You want to get there early and on a weekday, with rush hour traffic...I don't have the patience. If I did, I'd have a lot bigger Burlco list because this is a great migrant and vagrant trap. And the western vagrant it has been hosting for almost the last month I finally could not stand not having on my state and county lists, so today, a quiet Saturday, I made the journey and was happily surprised that it only took about an hour. 

Now all I had to do was find the bird. This wasn't my first attempt. About 3 weeks ago, Mike & I tried for the bird, going down there mid-afternoon and missing it by about an hour. This, like most flycatchers, is a very active bird that seems to have settled into semi-regular route, so I walked down to the intersection of the Cove and Perimeter Trails and started looking around. I met a trio of Palmyra regulars, but since the bird was old hat for them, they weren't actively looking for it. Soon I ran into an old friend (the man who taught Shari & me the song of the Field Sparrow, back when we were novice birders) and we, along with another birder, after exchanging phone numbers, spread out and reconvened for a couple of hours, never straying very far from the intersection. 

After more than 3 hours of hunting up and down the same trails, I was getting pretty disgusted. I was thinking that I have to make a decision about next year: either I'm going to drop everything and chase as soon as I hear about a bird or else I'm going to bird the places I like and find what I find and get over my FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), because this year's dilly-dallying diffidence has only led to frustration. And then...

Just as Tom, the birder who originally found the bird, came up the trail, my phone rang and 50 feet away one of the guys said that the birder next to him had just had the bird and we all (there were a few more seekers now) hurried up the trail. Tom stepped up into the woods, said he heard the bird (it makes a high "tseet" call, which is how it was separated from the nearly identical Corderillan Flycatcher) and then found the bird in a tree. Brief moment of panic while I looked and could not see but then it flitted from branch to branch as I checked off the field marks--wing bars, greenish back, tear-shaped eye ring, flicking tail, bang! Pacific-slope Flycatcher.

The bird lived up to its reputation as extremely active, flying onto the path for a second, then into the underbrush on the other side of the path, perching up for a moment, diving down, reappearing, as we all crept along following the directions of Lloyd who was best able to keep his eye on it. I climbed up a small hill next to the path just as the flycatcher flew across again to the west side and miraculously I was able to get pictures of the bird, perched low in the reeds. 

Yes. Brief moment of satisfaction. And then my thoughts turned toward the birds I was missing: Ash-throated Flycatcher at Sandy Hook, Mountain Bluebird in Cape May, White-winged Dove in Point Pleasant which would be a home county bird...birding is like baseball, it is, as Bart Giamatti wrote, "designed to break your heart."