Great Bay Blvd 2/23--Palm Warbler

By the time I got down to the beach at Great Bay Blvd, the birding had been so dull that I'd forgotten I was looking for new birds. This may be a corollary to Rule #2--you won't find the bird until you've truly give up. Or forgotten all about it. I was on my way back to the little path through the grove when I saw on the beach a little bird in the wrack line. It was brown. It was pumping its tail. When it flew, I could see small white corners on the tail feathers. It was a Palm Warbler, one of the birds I was hoping to see (the other was Great Egret) today. I watched it fly back to the mud flats and followed it there, catching a glimpse of it again but a picture was impossible. In among the flattened reeds were 4 or 5 Yellow-rumped Warblers with which it was "associating."

There really wasn't much of interest along the road--lots of ducks, as you would expect, but land birds were scarce. Again, February is the slowest month. But here is

A Heartwarming Tale

 I was coming back to my car at the monitoring station to get my scope, because I had seen 3 Greater Yellowlegs out in the marsh when a woman stopped her car and waved frantically at me. I didn't recognize her at first, but remembered her when she said that I had shown her the eagles. 6 or 7 months ago, when I was in one of my rare good moods, she had stopped to talk to me about photographing birds. She was looking for hawks, so I told her where to go to find the two eagles that nest at the end of the road. Later, when I saw that she was having a had time finding them, I set up my scope and showed her the birds. 

"I've been looking for you," she said. "I was really depressed that day, I was going through some bad times and you showed me where the eagles were and it changed my life!" She had, in the last few months, become fascinated with eagles and had educated herself on how to tell the males from the females, how long the female's talons were, incubation periods, nesting habits, mating rituals. More than I know off the top of my head about eagles--she had inhaled a reference book on eagles and all because one day I'd taken the time to show her a couple birds in a telescope. She showed me videos she'd made of eagles with their chicks, she told me where to find other nests, she showed me lots of pictures of eagles and, by the way, they were excellent photos and videos. But she wouldn't stop thanking me; it was embarrassing. I had no idea, at the time, that she was in a deep funk. I wasn't trying to rescue anyone. I was just showing a stranger a couple of cool birds that lead lives parallel to ours. When I came home and told Shari about my encounter, she said, "See, see what can happen when you're nice!" 

"Yeah," I replied, grumpily. Meanwhile, I never did get to check out the yellowlegs in the scope; I heard them fly away when I was talking to her. They flew away right after she & I spotted a Peregrine Falcon taking off from the top of a utility pole. 

Stafford Avenue with repairs

Afterwards I drove up to Manahawkin WMA and walked my usual route from the Hilliard Avenue entrance out to Stafford Avenue which leads to the Bridge to Nowhere. I've been taking this route of late because Stafford Avenue was impassable with huge craters all along its one and half miles, perfect traps to rip out the bottom of your car. Because it literally goes to nowhere, and runs between a WMA and Forsythe property, I figured  no one had any incentive to ever fix it, so I was flabbergasted to see that long stretches had been smoothed over and filled in with gravel. 

Peggy tells me that the Bridge to Nowhere is a well-known spot for shall we say assignations. Guys apparently cruise the road looking for prostitutes. I'm down there often and I've never seen a prostitute, but she tells me that a woman birder alone in her car will get propositioned by guys mistaking her for a sex worker. 

Look at the photo. Do you see any prostitutes? Maybe it's a Never on Sunday thing. Or maybe, as Peggy proposed, they're all hiding in the marsh. Or maybe they just couldn't get their vehicles down the road and now that it is no longer an obstacle course, business will pick up.