The abandoned cranberry bogs on Dover Road had two appealing aspects to them today: Firstly, there was no possibility of an inane conversation about eagles with a guy in a pickup truck and secondly, I there was the possibility of finding a Wilson's Snipe for the year.
Despite going there a lot, I am usually in the peculiar position of always knowing where I am but never being exactly sure how I got there. All the trails look alike (overgrown), and two of the landmarks I use, skeletal pump house remains, are duplicates of each other, so I often turn down a trail and find myself in a spot I wasn't particularly aiming for. But that's okay, because at least none of the bogs are breached (unlike Reeves Bogs), so there isn't a lot of backtracking to do if you make an inadvertent turn. But like Reeves Bogs, I always wear my waterproof Muck boots, since you never know which trail is going to be flooded. One trail, that I used to like to take, when viewed on the Google satellite map, shows up as water for a about a hundred yards and, that's the only trail I avoid now. So I guess it isn't strictly true that none of the bogs are breached. My rule of thumb is to walk only where I can see the bottom; from prior experience, I know the murky depths of that stretch, and I don't want to repeat the slippery walk through the brush on the side of the trail.
So today, on my snipe hunt, I decided to walk trails I usually don't consider promising. It paid off as I almost immediately found 3 snipe flying out of one of the muddy bogs. It is completely unclear to me how the water is controlled there, if at all. Sometimes, bogs have water in them, sometimes they're muddy. I walked around to where I saw the snipes fly and looking back into the first bog, heard a Killdeer. Then I saw two snipe fly back to where I started. Later in the morning, upon returning to the same bog, half-accidentally, I saw both the Killdeer and a snipe on the far side. I got good looks, but always, no matter where I stood, they were on the opposite side.
Geese and duck numbers were down from my visit on Sunday though I saw more kinds of waterfowl and I was again only able to come up with 19 species of birds altogether. But it is always fun to flush a snipe.
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| Mourning Dove |
Canada Goose 2
Mallard 13
American Black Duck 21 Scattered around + flyovers
Ring-necked Duck 6
Bufflehead 2
Hooded Merganser 2
Mourning Dove 2
Killdeer 1
Wilson's Snipe 3
Turkey Vulture 4
American Crow 6
Carolina Chickadee 2
Red-breasted Nuthatch 2
Carolina Wren 1 Heard
American Goldfinch 2
Field Sparrow 2 Buildings
American Tree Sparrow 3 Bogs
Red-winged Blackbird 8
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