Island Beach SP 5/25--SOOTY SHEARWATER

It figures that the day I go to Brig and get 3 rarities is the day that a flight of the seldom seen from shore SOOTY SHEARWATER should appear all along the Jersey shore from Cape May to Deal, including many spots in Ocean County. That's another law: Wherever you are, you should be somewhere else. 

As a Sooty Shearwater would be a life bird for me, this morning I got up and said to myself, "Let's go look for the Shitty Shearwaters." I knew from the descriptions I'd been reading that this would not be as exciting as the day I finally got my life Dovekies; all the reports had the birds far offshore; you read "by the 1 mile buoy" and you know no one is getting the field guide looks. Still, since I'm never going on a pelagic I'd better seize the opportunity. I decided that Island Beach afforded me the best chance for viewing without having to stand elbow to elbow with a lot of other birders on a jetty at Manasquan or Barnegat. I got to the dune crossing at A23 and set up my scope. As so often happens when looking for a rarity, you either find it right away or else you get it at the very end. There is no middle. Today, after a few moments I saw two dark gray birds with pointed wings that had silvery highlights, gliding low over the waves to the south of where I stood. There were the birds. It wasn't even anticlimactic. It was just species #1401. No jumping up and down with happiness as with the Dovekies. Tubenoses are not charismatic birds like alcids. If I didn't know that were around, I strongly doubt I'd ever pick them on my own. This makes the 3rd shearwater I've seen from shore. 

Purple Sandpipers

I walked down to the jetty. On the way I saw one more shearwater. Three seems to be about the average number of birds getting reported by any one observers. Some have 18, some only 1. Some birds down at the jetty were actually more interesting to me than seeing the flight of the shearwaters. There had been small gatherings of shorebirds all along the mile walk--oystercatchers, Black-bellied Plovers, turnstones, Sanderlings--and at the jetty, with more beautiful turnstones, was a sandpiper I didn't recognize at first. They had the conformation, beak, and leg color of Purple Sandpipers, but their plumage was all "wrong." Besides, I thought that Purple Sandpipers, a specialty of Barnegat Light across the inlet would, like the Harlequin Ducks, be long gone. However, eBird doesn't even have them as "infrequent" much less rare at this time of year. I just had never seen (or remember seeing) Purple Sandpipers in spring. 

I walked to the "back" of the jetty and found one Black Scoter. Again, not rare. However, the 110 Common Eiders I counted, those were rare. Supposedly there are a few King Eider hens mixed in with the flock. They must have been in the half that flew off in the midst of my counting. 

Common Eiders

I had 29 species in the mile and a half from the parking lot to the overlook of the Sedge Islands.

Canada Goose  14

Common Eider  110      

Black Scoter  1       

American Oystercatcher  6

Black-bellied Plover  11

Semipalmated Plover  4

Ruddy Turnstone  22

Sanderling  16

Dunlin  47

Purple Sandpiper  17

Semipalmated Sandpiper  15

Laughing Gull  100

Herring Gull  50

Lesser Black-backed Gull  1     Immature

Great Black-backed Gull  15

Common Tern  10

Forster's Tern  5

SOOTY SHEARWATER   3       

Double-crested Cormorant  20

Great Egret  2

Osprey  4

Eastern Kingbird  1

Fish Crow  4

Barn Swallow  1

American Goldfinch  2

Song Sparrow  3

Eastern Towhee  1     Heard

Boat-tailed Grackle  1

Common Yellowthroat  1