Barnegat CBC 1/5

Mike & I did the Manahawkin section of the Barnegat Christmas Bird Count on Sunday, the last day of the long Christmas count season. We were birding well before dawn and kept at it for 12 hours. Our section includes the Manahawkin WMA, The Bridge to Nowhere & Beach Avenue sections of Forsythe, north to Taylor Lane in Barnegat, west to the Southern Regional School section and South to the bay and Manahawkin Lake. This year we also included the Oxycocus Bog, a little know section of Forsythe. Though it sounds like an opoid, Oxycocus is Latin for Cranberry, spelled wrong--there should be double 'c' at the end, but that's how it's spelled 'round here.

The predawn birding was a little disappointing. Wind was an obstacle both to hearing birds and for the birds themselves to be calling. We did manage to hear an Eastern Screech-Owl on Stafford Avenue on the edge of the WMA and we flushed an American Woodcock on Beach Avenue, but no other owl were in evidence, nor was the Sedge Wren we sometimes get.

I like doing the count for selfish reasons--because it is early in the new year, it gives a kick start to me county list. This count I added 27 county birds, none of them particularly difficult birds, though hearing a Red-shouldered Hawk in the WMA was a happy event. Would have been happier if we were able to track it down. Of the 27 county birds, 13 also qualified as year birds.

Because it is the Christmas Count, we had special permission to walk in parts of the Forsythe area normally closed, so we walked all the way out on Beach Avenue to where the AT&T building used to be, a good mile or more on busted up asphalt. We tallied plenty of ducks, geese, hundreds of robins, and the first of our eagles and Peregrine Falcons. In another section off Beach Avenue there was a rudimentary path which we explored. A couple of hundred feet in we found this:
It reminded me of a place I used to bird in Brooklyn, the Salt Marsh Nature Center, which was full of abandoned, burnt out junk heaps. Great place to bird though. At least in a marsh you can figure out how they got the cars in there--drive like hell on the mud until it won't go no more.

But here was a sports car in the middle of the woods. Lots of trees to maneuver around. Then it occurred to us that this wasn't always woods. There was a nearby derelict building. We figured it used to be fields and the trees had grown up around the car. It looks, to my eye, sort of a like a 50's sports car.

Our northernmost section, Taylor Lane, only produced a Hermit Thrush along with more robins. The Oxycocus Bog had lots of tweety birds and on a lawn across the street 3 species of icterids.

We checked out Ocean Acres Country Club and in the little pond off 72 found a few good ducks--our only wigeons and Ring-necked Ducks for the day. We kept returning to Stafford and Beach Avenues, adding one or two species to the list and adding to our over all counts. It is a Christmas Bird Count, after all.

By the end of the day we had 59 species in our section. I have to say I was getting pretty sick of Beach Avenue by then. Because of the wind, a lot of birds stay hunkered down, so we missed some easy ones like goldfinch and pigeon (!). Had it not been for the continuing wind and general exhaustion, it might have paid to linger on Stafford in the hopes of a Short-eared Owl or to hear a Great Horned Owl, but our last birds of the day was a large flock of blackbirds coming into the marsh to roost and with that, we ended our count.