I saw this bird at 8:22 this morning on a path that parallels the entrance road to Whitesbog. I didn't find out that I had a year bird until 4:17 this afternoon when one of my Burlco friends, looking at my eBird list, pointed out in a message that it wasn't the Cooper's Hawk I assumed it was, but rather, a Broad-winged Hawk.
The bird was flying through the woods along the path and the only picture I got was the one above. It didn't look quite right for a Coop to me (I had seen one earlier mobbed by crows on the runway near Ditch Meadow) but Broad-winged Hawk is flagged as rare, and, without being able to the band on the tail or the underwings, I defaulted to the "infrequent" bird rather than the rarity. All this is a roundabout way of saying that I'm pretty lousy when it comes to hawks that I only see once in a while. Every birder misidentifies birds, but it is embarrassing when you're the birder doing the misidentifying. It also leads me to wonder what other rarities I've missed along the way.
But that capped off a good morning at Whitesbog--not as good as I would hope at this time of year, when in the past the bogs would have started to be drawn down. This year, like last year, it doesn't look as if the farmer can afford to do the birding community the favor of turning the bogs to mud---a combination of little rain this summer and beavers damming up the source of a lot of his water has made the water in the bogs too precious to just drain away down Cranberry Run. We might get lucky later in the month if he has to pump out one of the bogs, but as of now, any mud I'm seeing is due to evaporation. So far this summer only the most common shorebirds have been seen there--Least Sandpaper, Spotted Sandpiper, Solitary Sandpiper, Killdeer, though I did have a Semipalmated Plover fly overhead around Union Pond.
The two birds that I got excited about before the hawk were a Virginia Rail calling from a wetlands across from the Upper Bog (it's the first Virginia Rail I've had on the Burlco side of Whitesbog) and an immature Little Blue Heron that I saw standing in a Union Pond then watched fly over the road, circle the Middle Bog and then fly back over Union and...gone. Another half mile up the road in Ocean County and LBHE would just be flagged as infrequent--in Burlco it's "rare."
For the morning, 44 species.
Canada Goose 11
Wood Duck 3
Mallard 7
Mourning Dove 2
Virginia Rail 1 Kek kek kek across from Upper Bog
Semipalmated Plover 1
Spotted Sandpiper 1
Least Sandpiper 4
Little Blue Heron 1
Green Heron 3
Cooper's Hawk 1 Chased by crows on landing strip
Broad-winged Hawk 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Northern Flicker 2
Eastern Wood-Pewee 5
Eastern Phoebe 2
Great Crested Flycatcher 2
Eastern Kingbird 15
White-eyed Vireo 2
Blue Jay 1
American Crow 9
Fish Crow 2
Carolina Chickadee 3
Tufted Titmouse 3
Tree Swallow 60
Purple Martin 10
Barn Swallow 6
White-breasted Nuthatch 2
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher 4
House Wren 1
Carolina Wren 2
European Starling 3
Gray Catbird 20
Eastern Bluebird 1
American Robin 6
American Goldfinch 2
Chipping Sparrow 4
Song Sparrow 10
Swamp Sparrow 1
Eastern Towhee 15
Orchard Oriole 1 Corner of Triangle Field
Red-winged Blackbird 15
Common Yellowthroat 8
Prairie Warbler 1
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