Whitesbog 9/13--Baird's Sandpiper, Long-billed Dowitcher

I should have taken my camera. When I got to Whitesbog this morning around 7 o'clock, it was socked in by fog. You couldn't see from one side of the bogs to the other. You could hear some birds, you could see the silhouettes of some ducks or some egrets, but it didn't appear that any photo opportunities were in the offing. 

I didn't even bother to take my scope on my first turn around the Upper Bog. I walked to the east end of it, wondering if the large flock of egrets that had been in the bogs the last couple of days were roosting in their usual place along the Cranberry Run. A few were, but not in big numbers. I did see a couple of Solitary Sandpipers right below me at the edge of the bog. That, and some Killdeer calls, were about all I came up in my first half hour there.  

Long-billed Dowitcher

It was also chilly, so I headed back to the car for another layer. Just then Tom pulled up and asked if I was getting my scope. I guess I was. He hadn't been there since the weekend, so I told him all the action, such as it was, had moved to the Middle Bog. We set up on the south side of the bog, but it was very difficult viewing conditions. We kept walking around until we got to the north side, with Union Pond behind us. In the mist we could see a lot of Great Egrets in both areas--33 was the number we settled on. It was clearing up a little, but it was still like looking through a scrim. In Union Pond I saw a shorebird with a very long bill and that was about all I could see of it. "Is that just a yellowlegs?" I asked Tom. He got on the bird and immediately said it was a dowitcher. Funny, we'd been talking about how dowitchers hadn't shown up yet just a few minutes before. Now, which dowitcher was it? 

Fortunately, the bird obliged us by flying into the Middle Bog, calling "Keek!" which is diagnostic for Long-billed Dowitcher. None of that subjective junk about whether it looked like it swallowed a basketball or if there was a slight bend at the tip of the beak. Keek!=Long-bill. Here was a bird, probably immature, that a couple of months ago had hatched on the North Slope of Alaska, around Prudhoe Bay, and now it was 4 or 5 thousand miles away in Burlington County eating worms and invertebrates in mud that two days ago was covered by 4 feet of water. Amazing. Tom put it on the RBA. And the sun suddenly burned away all the fog. 

But that day got better, surpassing the One Cool Bird A Day requirement. After scouring the bog for all the other sandpipers and plovers that were alternately feeding and flying, Tom came up with a Baird's Sandpiper only a few feet away from the dowitcher. Normally, you'd expect to see Bairds on dryer land or in a grassy area--when they've shown up at Whitesbog, that's where they've been, but this one seemed to prefer the channel that runs through the bog. It was, like the rest of the birds there, pretty active, and we had a hard time keeping an eye on it, but with three of us there (we had been joined by Eric who saw the RBA and immediately came over from his nearby workplace), we managed to keep track of it and enjoy it. Sometimes we had both the Baird's and dowitcher in the same scope view. 

Of course, all this time my camera was in the car, but I did manage decent digiscope shots of the dowitcher. The Baird's was too far, and the glare was too bad for me to manage a digiscope of it that looked like something more than "blurry shorebird.

One more highlight of the day was a huge, swirling kettle of Turkey Vultures over Ditch Meadow that we could see from our vantage point. In with those vultures were 4 Common Nighthawks (very unusual to see so late in the morning) and 3 Red-shouldered Hawks. It was the calling of the hawks that alerted us to the kettle in the first place. And, still standing in the same spot, watching the Lower Bog draw down as the pump sucked out water, we had 6 Common Ravens fly over us. 

And that is why I return to Whitesbog every day that the water is low: FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). You just don't know what's going to plunk down or fly over that relatively small area of mud and puddles. 11 species of shorebirds today--you have to do a lot of driving at Brig to get as much variety as we did just standing in one spot. 

The day list:

33 species
Mallard  17
American Black Duck  2
Green-winged Teal  3     Middle Bog
Common Nighthawk  4
Killdeer  8
Semipalmated Plover  15
Long-billed Dowitcher  1     
Spotted Sandpiper  2
Solitary Sandpiper  2
Lesser Yellowlegs  6
Greater Yellowlegs  4
Baird's Sandpiper  1     
Least Sandpiper  20
Pectoral Sandpiper  10
Semipalmated Sandpiper  12
Great Egret  33     
Great Blue Heron  2
Black Vulture  4
Turkey Vulture  38
Red-shouldered Hawk  3     
Belted Kingfisher  1
Downy Woodpecker  1
Northern Flicker  2
Eastern Phoebe  1
American Crow  4
Common Raven  6     
Carolina Chickadee  2
Barn Swallow  1
Gray Catbird  5
Song Sparrow  2
Eastern Towhee  3
Common Yellowthroat  3
Northern Cardinal  1