Shelter Cove | Cattus Island CP 3/16--Snowy Egret, Osprey

Osprey, Shelter Cove

Alert: It isn't your eyes nor your computer. These are really crappy photos. 

This morning I remembered a few years ago going around the Wildlife Drive at Brig with Mike when we were looking at distant ducks across the impoundments. Mike said, "Isn't is great how good we've gotten identifying birds from so far away?" I replied, "Yeah, but it isn't any fun." 

Snowy Egret, Cattus Island CP

The memory came to me at Cattus Island after finding a Snowy Egret way across the creek on the Ocean County Parks HQ side. How'd I know it was a snowy and not the more expected Great Egret? Size, admittedly hard to judge from a distance, shape & posture, and of course, the black bill I could barely see in my binoculars. My picture was taken with my new camera which has a 67X zoom. (Why 67? Why not 65, or 70?) It looked better in my binoculars. I thought about going back to the car for the scope but then thought, "For a Snowy Egret? That's a lot of work." Not exactly birdwatching; more like bird-ticking.

Earlier, I had a similar experience at Shelter Cove. I walked along the beach over to the marsh half expecting to find an early Osprey and after scanning the empty nest platforms, found one sitting atop a tree. Again, really distant and 67X doesn't help, especially when you've somehow got the wrong settings for an automatic camera, but clearly, head pattern alone told me it was Osprey. 

Ever since a long summer vacation 40 years ago on Martha's Vineyard where the cottage I stayed in was directly across a pond from a pair of constantly cheeping Ospreys, this species has been one of my least favorite birds, so I wasn't devastated that I didn't get the field guide looks this morning. I am sorry to have taken the picture as my belief is that there are already approximately one billion more photos of Ospreys than there need to be--and at least a half billion of them have been taken of a particular, nicely lit nest at Brig--but I try to document each new year bird. Usually, each year at Brig, I take one excellent photo of an Osprey and post it here in the hopes that, having already made the perfect photograph it will dissuade others from hogging up the road at Brig but it never seems to work so maybe I'll just forgo the futility this year.