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| Black-crowned Night-Heron (immature) |
Two targets and two surprises made for a good day on LBI. On my way up to Barnegat Lighthouse, I stopped at the Bayview Avenue Park. After a quick look at the bay from there I drove a little farther north to the corner, where a grove of trees surrounds a municipal well. I don't know if this is technically part of the park, but I include it in my lists. My target there was
Black-crowned Night-Heron, a bird that roosts there in the winter. It used to be you had to walk along the road and hope you'd see one tucked high up in a cedar. Then, sometime in the last few years, a path was cut into the grove by parties unknown. This made it easy to find the herons, at first. But then they disappeared for a year or so. One theory was owls, another was too damn many people traipsing in there to say hello. The latter idea seems more likely to me.
The opening of the path is not quite as easy to find as it first was, overgrown as it is with phragmites, so that might have helped in the return of the herons, because as soon as I took steps onto the path, I flushed two immature birds. There were probably a lot more in there, but I didn't want to disturb the roost any more than I already had. I stood exactly where my first two steps had taken me, took some photos of one bird, and left happy. Year bird--as if I'm not going to eventually see night-herons dozens of times this year, although, as a friend of mine once observed, "At my age, you never know."
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| Least Sandpiper |
My first surprise of the day was while walking around the pond at Barnegat Lighthouse to get to the end of the beach. In the winter, this is a much better way of getting there than either walking on the jetty or trying to cross the inlet on the beach that feeds the pond. In the summer, when the pond is restricted for the nesting plovers and oystercatchers, it is either hope for low tide or wear muck boots. Nothing much of interest was in the pond--the usual waterfowl and gulls--but when I got to the eastern end of it I found one
Dunlin feeding along the edge, and then, a couple more skittering around the geese and with those two were two
Least Sandpipers, rare for this time of year, although it is the third time I've had Least Sandpiper in winter there.
I got to the jetty, took one look at the spray exploding over it, and knew I wasn't going to spend much time up there. The rocks were all slippery and I had a time of it finding one that was low enough and dry enough to get up there, but I couldn't look over the edge where the Harlequin Ducks hang out without get a shower of seawater. It was amusing to watch the Purple Sandpipers fly up out of the rock crevasses every time a wave hit. It was entertaining for three minutes, and then I jumped off onto the beach.
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| Black-bellied Plover |
With the rough seas I didn't see much profit in spending a lot of time scoping the ocean, though it wasn't hard to identify the rafts of
Long-tailed Ducks. I found a few skunk-heads (
Surf Scoters) bobbing in the swells, but my walk south to the buried mast of the Sea Star didn't turn up anything else. When I returned to the jetty the waves hitting the rocks seemed to have calmed down and standing atop there were two birding friends of mine, so I clambered up again. This time, in addition to the arial antics of the Purple Sandpipers, I was able to get close enough to the jetty to see some Harlequin Ducks. Comparing notes, they told me they had seen a
Black-bellied Plover on their trek through the sand and I told them of the Leasts. I had come to the Light thinking it was time to add Black-bellied Plover to the year list so I walked along the jetty until I came to a little flock of Dunlins feeding among the rocks and with them, one plover. Easy to see why they're "Grey Plovers" in Europe. D & L & I met up again by the pond, but we couldn't find "my" Least Sandpipers. We walked along the berm on the south side of the pond, and it was there that I got the only bird I might not see/hear again all year. D called out "
Red Crossbill!" just as the "jip jip" call was sinking into the auditory processing area of my brain.
For the Light, 33 species. The night-herons were the only other species at the Bayview Ave Park that weren't duplicated at the Light.
Brant 100
Canada Goose 50
Mallard 10
American Black Duck 15
Harlequin Duck 4
Surf Scoter 5
Long-tailed Duck 100
Bufflehead 5
Red-breasted Merganser 70
Mourning Dove 1
Black-bellied Plover 1
Ruddy Turnstone 1
Sanderling 4
Dunlin 25
Purple Sandpiper 30
Least Sandpiper 2
Herring Gull 300
Great Black-backed Gull 50
Red-throated Loon 1
Common Loon 1
Great Cormorant 9
Turkey Vulture 1 Dunes
Carolina Wren 1 Heard
European Starling 200
Northern Mockingbird 2
American Robin 1
House Sparrow 5
House Finch 1 Heard
Red Crossbill 1
Snow Bunting 50 Pond
Savannah Sparrow (Ipswich) 2
Red-winged Blackbird 5 Phragmites on edge of pond
Yellow-rumped Warbler 5
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