Crestwood Village 2/15--Western Tanager

 At about 4:45 this afternoon, I got an alert on my phone about a Western Tanager in my neighborhood. Below is the text of my eBird report:

The address where the Western Tanager was reported is literally around the corner from my house--.4 miles. I immediately walked over there. I was dubious, thinking perhaps it was an oriole (which would still be good). I walked in the woods first, thinking the bird might be there, then came out and walked down Milford to the address listed. Naturally, no bird was there, but two doors down I heard, "Pit-rick" loud, 3 times. I couldn't locate the bird before it flew out of a small tree and back into much taller trees where I lost it. If the bird had alighted in the tree where I thought it went, it would have been pushed out by the 20 robins that suddenly landed in it.

 According to a fellow birder whom I've been texting, this is the third Western Tanager sighting in the county this winter, all widely separated. All have been one day wonders. What kills me is that the house where the bird was spotted has one cylinder feeder and gets the rarity, while we, much less than .4 miles away as the tanager flies, have 7 or 8 feeders and 2 birdbaths and the bird doesn't show up here. And I've been looking because today is a Feederwatch day. 

County bird. Not the most satisfying sighting, but county bird nevertheless. 

Cranberry Bogs 2/14--Wilson's Snipe

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.

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

Northern Cardinal  1     Heard     

Third Pickup Truck/Eagle Conversation of the Year

Locale: Whitesbog

Vehicle: Grey Chevy Silverado (not the same truck from conversation #1)

I have my binoculars to the sky, watching two Red-shouldered Hawks.

Dialog:

Pickup Truck Driver: Looking at eagles?

Me: No. Red-shouldered Hawks.

PTD: I saw one close last week. I got lucky

I don't know if he's referring to eagles or hawks and don't ask.

Me: They're around.

He drives off. 

 

Cranberry Bogs 2/12--Wood Duck

I went to the abandoned cranberry bogs on Dover Road this morning, hoping for a Wilson's Snipe. The walk got off to an inauspicious start, when the first bird I saw was the snipe's near cousin, an American Woodcock--dead. There are sections there where it wouldn't be surprising to come across a woodcock, but atop a hill next to a huge sandpit is not one of them. The bird looked freshly dead and didn't seem to show any signs of raptors at work. I know that some natural history museums might like it as a specimen, but since I have an aversion to dead animals, I left it there. Probably will make a snacky-poo for a vulture. 

I didn't find a snipe, though I know one is still there, but I did, finally, add a year bird to the list when I came across a trio of Wood Ducks. At first, they were so still that I had to look twice to make certain they weren't decoys but decoys rarely squeal and fly off before you can get a picture, so they're on the list. Other than that, not much else to report. For a moment I thought I might have a couple of Chipping Sparrows to add to the year list, but upon further inspection they turned out to be American Tree Sparrows, again. It's another instance of priming--I want Chipping Sparrow so I see Chipping Sparrow, even though American Tree Sparrow is usually the harder bird to find--though not this winter. 

As with seemingly every other body of water around here, the duckage was light--I counted 28 Ring-necked Ducks along with a couple of Hooded Mergansers, 3 Mallards, and a flying black duck. Yesterday, at Colliers Mills, I was so disgusted that the 4 ponds I check had not one specimen of waterfowl on any of them, not even a goose, that I drove two miles up Success Road to Success Lake where I triumphed with 3 Tundra Swans, a goose, a couple of black ducks, and a Bufflehead. We're not even halfway through February yet--I don't know how much more of nothing I can take. 

Today's little list: 

19 species
Canada Goose  40
Wood Duck  3
Mallard  3
American Black Duck  1
Ring-necked Duck  28
Hooded Merganser  2
Killdeer  1
Red-tailed Hawk  1
Northern Flicker  1
Blue Jay  2     Heard
Carolina Chickadee  3     Heard
Carolina Wren  1     Heard
Eastern Bluebird  7
American Robin  20
American Goldfinch  1
American Tree Sparrow  2
Song Sparrow  1     Heard
Red-winged Blackbird  10
Northern Cardinal  1     Heard

Second Pickup Truck/Eagle Conversation of the Year

Locale: Colliers Mills Lake

Vehicle: Red Jeep Patriot (technically not a pick up truck but for our purposes it will suffice.)

I am scoping the north end of the lake looking for anything besides Canada Geese. Driver approaches.

Dialog: 

Driver: How ya doing?

Me: Hi

Driver: Looking for eagles?

Me: No

Driver throws away cigarette, gets in vehicle, leaves. Had he stuck around 5 more minutes I could have shown him an immature eagle being chased by a Red-tailed Hawk. 

 

First Pickup Truck/Eagle Conversation of the Year

Locale: Stafford Avenue between Manahawkin WMA and Bridge to Nowhere.

Vehicle: Gray Chevy Silverado

(Truck slows down approaching me as I think, "Oh please don't stop." Truck stops.)

Dialog:

Pickup truck driver: Birdwatching?

Me: Yes

PTD: Are there eagles here?

Me: Yes

PTD: (pointing to Manahawkin side) In the marsh? 

Me: (pointing north) Over there

PTD: In the woods. Ever see them?

Me: All the time.

PTD drives off. 

Home | New Egypt 2/1--Pine Warbler & Priming

Two semi-interesting events this first of the month. Second one first: I looked out at one of our suet feeders and saw my first Pine Warbler of the year.  There have been winters when I could not not see a Pine Warbler on the feeder, to the point where I had to tell the eBird reviewer that I was tired of documenting this supposedly rare bird, but this has not been one of those winters. Still, it is no longer listed as "rare" in Ocean County during the cold months. 

The first one was while I was driving around New Egypt, looking for kestrels on the wires along the roads, as I often do in the winter. There's no good reason to do this, since I'm going to see a kestrel eventually in the county, more than likely at Colliers Mills, but I do it anyway. And thus, I was able to demonstrate the psychological concept of "priming." Since I was looking for kestrels, when I saw a bird land atop a pole on Long Swamp Road that wasn't a crow, I pulled off to the shoulder, shot a few pictures through the side window and figured I had my county kestrel. I couldn't really stay there and study the bird in that precarious position, but I was primed for kestrel. It wasn't until I got home and looked at my photographs, that I realized it wasn't a kestrel at all, but a Merlin, which is actually more infrequent in that area than kestrel. If I hadn't been looking for kestrel, I probably would have known immediately that the bird on the pole was a Merlin, but too often we see what we want to see. In this case, inconsequential. But too often, of late, not.