Palmyra Cove Nature Park is a long 42 miles from here. On a weekday morning it takes about an hour and half to get there; on a Sunday morning, only an hour. Lots of traffic lights on ugly Rt 73. But if you want to have a good Burlco list, you have to bird this migrant trap on the Delaware. Lots of varied habitat--the river, the cove, the ponds, the woods. So, I've been considering making it my Sunday trip. It has the advantage of being fairly devoid of people once you get away from the parking lot and the river trail. About the only people you're likely to run into are birders--good birders.
I knew Jim and Matt would be there today. In the dozen or so times I've visited, I've never gotten past a pier that juts out into the cove. The real Palmyra birders go another thousand feet or so to a footbridge that affords views of both the cove and the river. Since the river is tidal and this morning was dead low tide, I found the duo actually out in the cove, after finding the semi-hidden path off the trail that will get you there. I didn't lug out my scope which meant I wasn't able to see some the distant raptors that they were getting, but then, I've never had much luck scoping the sky anyway. Ravens, Osprey, & kestrel were new for the month for me, and we had Cooper's Hawk and 5 Bald Eagles fly over too.
After a while we move back onto the bridge, checking out the gulls and Caspian Terns flying north & south. A pleasant and unexpected surprise of the morning was to see Scott coming on to the bridge--it was like seeing a bird make an appearance well out of its range.
After walking back to the parking lot so Jim & Matt could store their scopes, we set out inland on the maze of trails through the woods and around ponds. I've never been real comfortable walking the trails there, not so much because I think I might get lost but because I fear winding up in a place I don't want to be with a long walk back to where I do want to be.
It was a relatively slow day there and long stretches of the woods were quiet, but like most places, you find pockets of birds and those pockets were rewarding. Around the big pool birds were flitting--we picked out a redstart and an oriole and some flycatchers, one of which turned out to be a Least Flycatcher, a bird I often miss for the year, so it was good to finally see one after a long hiatus. Birds I wasn't necessarily thinking about made appearances--a Veery, a Black-throated Blue Warbler, a couple of Magnolia Warblers. All birds I don't see very often in my normal haunts. Then Matt found a Bay-breasted Warbler, another new one for the year. It was a tad difficult to get on and not in breeding plumage with only a hint of bay on the flanks, but a very good addition to the list. Unless I go to Magee Marsh in Ohio, I might only see one of those a year, so that's probably the one.
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| Scarlet Tanager |
The last cool bird of the day was a female Scarlet Tanager which, being greenish yellow, blended in very well with the leaves it was sitting in. (See above)
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| Spotted Lantern Flies |
A disturbing sight was seeing my first Spotted Lantern Flies. I've seen billboards warning about them and the destruction to trees they cause, but until today I'd never seen one. I saw dozens today. So many of the trees there were crawling with the bugs. Some, it was true were on their natural host, the ailanthus tree (of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn fame), an introduced species, but others were on native trees. There's a phone number to report the bug, but I have the feeling that the authorities know about this infestation. What they can do about it, other than cutting down all the trees in the park, I don't know.
I got 53 species on the day, which isn't a patch on what the better birders were getting; a later start and the inability to i.d. birds on the wing kept my numbers down. But by far, the best day I've ever had at Palmyra.
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