January Summary

Red-headed Woodpecker, Colliers Mills

It has to be pretty cold in the morning for me not to go out birding. This month there were five days in a row when hypothermia was a potential problem, so I did a lot of feederwatching those days.  And the days when the weather was bearable, I felt I had to walk around, so I didn't spend any time watching the ocean for alcids which appear to have been abundant up by Manasquan Inlet. 

Some of my other notable sightings not previously narrated here were tracking down the Red-headed Woodpecker(s) at Colliers Mills, one time in a grove where I hadn't seen them before; finding a few Savannah Sparrows of the Ipswich persuasion at Barnegat Light yesterday; having 16 turkeys visit us this morning; and finally, perhaps most surprising, was glancing out the window to see a V of Snow Geese fly overhead. Snow Geese have become harder to find in county recently. Time was you could go out to New Egypt and always come across a big flock of them but not no more. So to have them as a backyard bird was a coup for the month. 

A visit to our backyard.

For the month I only managed 105 species. That's what happens when you stay away from the Ocean in Ocean County. But I don't have frost bite either.

Species    First Sighting
Snow Goose    35 Sunset Rd
Brant    Sandy Hook
Canada Goose    35 Sunset Rd
Mute Swan    Manahawkin Lake
Tundra Swan    Whitesbog
Northern Shoveler    Marshall's Pond
Gadwall    Ocean Acres Pond
American Wigeon    Marshall's Pond
Mallard    Whitesbog
American Black Duck    Sandy Hook
Green-winged Teal    Ocean Acres Pond
Canvasback    Riverfront Landing
Redhead    Lake Carasaljo
Ring-necked Duck    Butterfly Bogs WMA
Greater Scaup    Sandy Hook
Common Eider    Sandy Hook
Harlequin Duck    Barnegat Lighthouse SP
Surf Scoter    Sandy Hook
White-winged Scoter    Sandy Hook
Black Scoter    Sandy Hook
Long-tailed Duck    Sandy Hook
Bufflehead    Sandy Hook
Common Goldeneye    Harvey Cedars
Hooded Merganser    Bunker Hill Bogs
Common Merganser    Pemberton Lake WMA
Red-breasted Merganser    Sandy Hook
Ruddy Duck    Stafford Township
Wild Turkey    35 Sunset Rd
Rock Pigeon    Manahawkin Lake
Mourning Dove    35 Sunset Rd
Killdeer    Manahawkin Lake
Greater Yellowlegs    Bridge to Nowhere
Sanderling    Sandy Hook
Purple Sandpiper    Barnegat Lighthouse SP
Ring-billed Gull    Bunker Hill Bogs
American Herring Gull    Sandy Hook
Great Black-backed Gull    Sandy Hook
Horned Grebe    Sandy Hook
Red-throated Loon    Sandy Hook
Common Loon    Sandy Hook
Northern Gannet    Sandy Hook
Great Cormorant    Sandy Hook
Double-crested Cormorant    Sandy Hook
American Bittern    Manahawkin WMA
Great Egret    Island Beach SP
Great Blue Heron    Sandy Hook
Black Vulture    New Egypt
Turkey Vulture    Sandy Hook
Sharp-shinned Hawk    Whitesbog
Cooper's Hawk    35 Sunset Rd
Northern Harrier    Sandy Hook
Bald Eagle    Sandy Hook
Red-shouldered Hawk    Whitesbog
Red-tailed Hawk    Forest Resource Education Center
Eastern Screech-Owl    Stafford Avenue
Great Horned Owl    Beach Ave
Long-eared Owl    Redacted
Belted Kingfisher    Manahawkin WMA
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker    Bridge to Nowhere
Red-headed Woodpecker    Colliers Mills WMA
Red-bellied Woodpecker    Whitesbog
Downy Woodpecker    Sandy Hook
Hairy Woodpecker    Whitesbog
Northern Flicker    BC Fairgrounds
Eastern Phoebe    Whitesbog
Blue Jay    Forest Resource Education Center
American Crow    35 Sunset Rd
Common Raven    Sandy Hook
Carolina Chickadee    35 Sunset Rd
Tufted Titmouse    35 Sunset Rd
Golden-crowned Kinglet    Whitesbog
White-breasted Nuthatch    35 Sunset Rd
Red-breasted Nuthatch    35 Sunset Rd
Brown Creeper    Colliers Mills WMA
Winter Wren    Whitesbog
Carolina Wren    35 Sunset Rd
European Starling    BC Fairgrounds
Gray Catbird    Manahawkin WMA
Northern Mockingbird    35 Sunset Rd
Eastern Bluebird    Whitesbog
Hermit Thrush    Whitesbog
American Robin    35 Sunset Rd
Cedar Waxwing    Island Beach SP
House Sparrow    35 Sunset Rd
House Finch    Sandy Hook
American Goldfinch    Sandy Hook
Snow Bunting    Sandy Hook
Chipping Sparrow    Forest Resource Education Center
Field Sparrow    New Egypt
American Tree Sparrow    Whitesbog
Fox Sparrow    Beach Ave
Dark-eyed Junco    35 Sunset Rd
White-crowned Sparrow    New Egypt
White-throated Sparrow    Forest Resource Education Center
Savannah Sparrow    Ephraim P. Emson Preserve
Song Sparrow    35 Sunset Rd
Swamp Sparrow    Cranberry Bogs
Red-winged Blackbird    Bridge to Nowhere
Brown-headed Cowbird    New Egypt
Common Grackle    BC Fairgrounds
Boat-tailed Grackle    Bridge to Nowhere
Pine Warbler    35 Sunset Rd
Yellow-rumped Warbler    Sandy Hook
Western Tanager    Sandy Hook
Northern Cardinal    Whitesbog

Ring-necked Duck, Colliers Mills

Barnegat Light SP | Harvey Cedars Sunset Park 1/30--Harlequin Duck, Common Goldeneye, Purple Sandpiper

Common Goldeneye, Harvey Cedars

Today it was a "Let's get 'em on the list day" both for the year and the county. You can find them elsewhere, but supposedly the easiest place to get Harlequin Ducks and Purple Sandpipers is Barnegat Light SP.  Today it was not easy. My first climb up onto the jetty produced lots of other ducks but no Harlequins, nor were Purple Sandpipers in evidence. There were big flocks of ducks on the ocean, including my county Common Eiders, but it took a walk up to the end of the remnants of the old 8th St jetty to finally find a half dozen or so of the Harlequins, mixed in with Buffleheads and Long-tailed Ducks. In my experience, if you can't find them off the jetty, then the walk up the beach is a reliable Plan B, but unfortunately, not a photo op. 

Purple Sandpiper, Barnegat Light SP

I returned to the jetty and despite not liking to do it I clambered up it again. I was happy to get great looks at a small flock of skunkheads (Surf Scoters) and then, turning around, sitting on a rock in the water I found my first Purple Sandpiper, posing. It flew up very close to me (they and the Harlequins are extraordinarily tame), in fact too close for the camera to focus. Eventually, I found a few more out on the rocks on the ocean side, and even two more Harlequins (drake & hen) sitting on a distant stone. 

Walking back through the pond area, I added Snow Bunting to the county list with an active flock of about 15. In the pond itself, aside from the usual Mallards, black ducks, Brant, and geese, were a drake and hen
American Wigeon, fairly unusual for this site. 

Snow Buntings, Barnegat Light SP

For the park I had 28 species, a spectacular number compared to what I've been able to find walking around the Pine Barrens.

Brant  150
Canada Goose  120
American Wigeon  2
Mallard  50
American Black Duck  30
Greater Scaup  60
Common Eider  20
Harlequin Duck  8
Surf Scoter  12
Black Scoter  15
Long-tailed Duck  100
Bufflehead  50
Red-breasted Merganser  70
Sanderling  20
Purple Sandpiper  7
Ring-billed Gull  1
American Herring Gull  300
Great Black-backed Gull  15
Common Loon  1
Double-crested Cormorant  2
Great Blue Heron  1
Blue Jay  1     Heard
American Crow  5
Common Raven  2     Large wedge-tailed croaking corvids
Red-breasted Nuthatch  1     Heard yank yank in cedars
Snow Bunting  15
Savannah Sparrow (Ipswich)  3
Yellow-rumped Warbler  15

Then I drove down to Harvey Cedars for another specialty of the site. Close to shore the water frozen, but farther out there were ducks, mostly Buffleheads and scaup too difficult to separate in the glare, but after the 40th Bufflehead I finally found what I was looking for--Common Goldeneye, actually two good-lucking drakes. For some inexplicable reason, Sunset Park in Harvey Cedars will almost always yield up a goldeneye or two, while you could look up and down the rest of Barnegat Bay and count yourself lucky to find one. 

Earlier in the month, when the deep freeze was on, someone asked me if I was interested in going to Barnegat Light and I said I could wait until March to get the ducks and sandpipers. But apparently the itch for them had to be scratched long before that. 

Manahawkin 1/29--American Bittern

American Bittern

Stafford Avenue in Manahawkin divides two birding areas--the Manahawkin WMA and the Bridge to Nowhere section of Forsythe.  If you are walking southeast, then the Bridge to Nowhere marsh is to your left and Manahawkin is to the right and if you are interested in keeping assiduous eBird lists then down that potholed road lies madness because you would have to keep two concurrent lists as you walked along, noting the birds to the east and noting the birds to the west and then keeping track of which birds flew across the road and in which direction, not to mention the birds that are on the road and not in either of the marshes, so you would conceivably want to start a third list for Stafford Avenue itself or you could do what I do which is start the list with either one depending upon where you begin and throw everything onto that list since eBird protocol is that the list is a survey of where your feet are when you see or hear the bird and not where the bird actually is, anyway.

I bring up this "inside baseball" topic because this morning I started from the Manahawkin WMA's parking lot off Hilliard, walked through the woods and out onto the impoundments came out on Stafford and walked down to the Bridge to Nowhere. From the little hill there I saw off in the marsh something that didn't look like phragmites. Short-eared Owls are known to winter here, but since it was well past sunrise, I didn't think I'd be that lucky, and I wasn't. Instead, it was an American Bittern, craning its neck in the reeds. Always a great find and always amusing as the bittern merges in and out of the background, sometimes completely hidden and sometimes in plain sight and seemingly not knowing the difference. 

Technically, though, the bittern was in the Forsythe section. What a quandary, especially since I don't have bittern on my Bridge to Nowhere patch list, while I have it a number of times in Manahawkin. Tempting to finagle the data or in this case to untangle the data and make a separate list but in the end, I decided to let one more flaw in the database sit there undisturbed. (By the way, most of the 68 Hooded Mergansers I counted were also in Forsythe as well as half the Great Blue Herons. The Northern Harrier flew from one side to the other.  Shh. Don't tell anyone.)

25 species
Canada Goose  14
Mallard  2
American Black Duck  26
Hooded Merganser  68
Killdeer  2
Greater Yellowlegs  17
Ring-billed Gull  30
American Herring Gull  1
American Bittern  1
Great Blue Heron  6
Turkey Vulture  3
Northern Harrier  1
Belted Kingfisher  3
Red-bellied Woodpecker  2
Downy Woodpecker  4
Hairy Woodpecker  1
Blue Jay  1
Carolina Chickadee  3
Tufted Titmouse  5
Northern Mockingbird  1
Hermit Thrush  1
American Robin  2
House Finch  10
Swamp Sparrow  1
Yellow-rumped Warbler  1

Greater Yellowlegs

Time + Place/Effort Expended=

I walked around the cranberry bogs off Dover Road for 2 hours, covering around 2 miles. I saw or heard:

8 species
Mourning Dove  20
Turkey Vulture  3
Blue Jay  1
American Crow  1
Carolina Chickadee  1
American Robin  2
American Goldfinch  1

Song Sparrow  1 

I came home, looked out my back window for 2 minutes. I saw:

8 species
Mourning Dove  5
Carolina Chickadee  1
Tufted Titmouse  1
White-breasted Nuthatch  1
Red-breasted Nuthatch  1     
American Robin  1
House Finch  5
American Goldfinch  3

Lake Carasaljo 1/18--Redhead

Ever in search of open water, I went to Lakewood's Lake Carasaljo (or, as I think of it, Lake Unpronounceable) this morning and found that about 500 geese had managed to keep approximately 1/10 of the lake (which is over a mile long) free of ice. In among the geese were a couple of swans, some Mallards, Ring-necked Ducks, and like yesterday at Marshall's Pond, a solo Bufflehead--and this time I looked really carefully. But it wasn't until I walked along the shore a little distance and came to the neat, recently installed pontoon bridge that crosses the lake that I found the duck I'd hoped to see. Mixed in with a slew of white domestic ducks, geese, and one Muscovy Duck (more on it below), was a Redhead, swimming right next to the bridge. 

Redheads are always a welcome sight, right up there with Canvasbacks in my duck pantheon, and I was especially happy because this sighting meant I didn't have to go to an out-of-the-way street in Brick and scan the flocks of scaup in Barnegat Bay for a distant Redhead or two. Last year I got lucky when I found a couple of these ducks floating along off Bay Parkway in Waretown, but they were, as usual, too difficult to photograph. 

I walked up to Route 9 without seeing anything beyond big flocks of Ring-billed Gulls sitting on the ice and few geese munching on a challah someone had thrown on the shore. I returned to the bridge where a young woman was intently watching the ducks. She immediately pointed out the Muscovy Duck to me and asked me what wrong with it. 

"Nothing," I said, "They're just extraordinarily ugly ducks."

"No, no," she said, "There's something wrong with its bill." 

Here's where the really looking comes in. I was pretty sure this was the same Muscovy Duck I'd seen last month which had waddled up to me and tried to untie my boot laces and since Muscovy Ducks are not "countable" I didn't give it much of a look. But indeed, she was right, the top section of its bill was gone and its tongue clear to see resting on the bottom bill. 

"These birds are sometimes not kind to each other," I told her as we watched three gulls squabble over a slice of bread. It looked to me like the Muscovy was out of its element in the wilds of Lakewood.

More interesting to me was that the Redhead had disappeared. It being a diving duck, I gave it some time to come up to the surface, but it was gone. So, as often happens, my life line just happened to intersect with its life line at the right time--for me. 

I crossed over the bridge which leads to a more forested area of the park and then swung around over the rivulet of the Metedeconk River that feeds the lake without seeing much more of interest except for a Brown Creeper at the base of a tree. 

When I got back to my car a woman in the parking lot asked me if I'd seen anything "good."  I told her I'd seen a Redhead.

"Have you been to Lake of the Lilies?" she asked.

"Not recently."

"There are Redheads there."

"Yes, but now I don't have to go there, do I?"

Then she asked me about eagles. It was time to leave. 

Marshall's Pond 1/17--Northern Shoveler, American Wigeon

You can observe a lot by looking  

                                                     --Yogi Berra

I stopped at Marshall's Pond today, hoping that the resident waterfowl had been moving around enough to keep some of the water open, since almost every body of water around here, including big swaths of Barnegat Bay, is frozen. And they had kept a small section ice-free. I'd like to think it's the heat they generate by swimming around as well as their body temperature, but sometimes I suspect excreta plays a role too. 

American Wigeons amid garbage

Of course, I was looking for year birds and Marshall's can have a good variety of ducks, but my first scan showed only geese, Mallards, a flock (32) of Ring-necked Ducks, and a lone Bufflehead. Not promising. I walked to the east end, hoping that section would also have some open water, but it was iced up all the way back, so I returned to the little draw of open water. I decided to look at every duck (there weren't that many) to see if something new for the year was mixed in with the others and sure enough, I quickly found a hen American Wigeon. Then I found a couple of others and then two more on the little garbage strewn island at the west end. 

Northern Shovelers (hens)

Looking around some more, I saw two smaller ducks with huge beaks float right by me--hen Northern Shovelers. Neither of these two species are rare, but they were both what I was hoping I'd find at this shopping mall's retention pond. I was happy to have them on the list but bothered that I didn't find them sooner--like the moment I got there. It wasn't as if I had thousands of ducks to sort through and it wasn't like they were similar to anything else on the pond, and I don't have the excuse that they were diving ducks and were underwater when I first scanned. So, the lesson I repeatedly have to relearn is to actually look at what's in front of me, instead of quickly ticking off "Mallard, ring-neck, single Bufflehead...let me look somewhere else." The Yiddish for "patience" is sitzfleisch.

Whitesbog 1/14--Eastern Phoebe

Sometimes, when the birding is going to be obviously slow, I take a perverse interest in how few birds I can find on a long walk.  Such was the case this morning at Whitesbog, where all the water is frozen, and a stiff wind was blowing. After walking about a hundred feet on the Ocean County side, I could tell it was game on.

By the time I reached the northern side of the Upper Reservoir after walking a circuitous mile and a half, I was doing pretty well (badly), having tallied three species--Carolina Chickadee, Golden-crowned Kinglet, Dark-eyed Junco--four, if you want to count the sparrow spuh that could have been Song, Swamp, or Savannah. I saw the junco just as I was starting up the side of the reservoir. Normally, this is a good place to see sparrows as they feed on the dike and jump from the brush into the trees across the path, but birds are smarter than we are, and all the junco's friends were, I'm sure, hunkered down. Of course, there's always the hope that while you might not see a lot, you might find something "interesting." As that thought was forming, a bird flew to my right and landed in a dead shrubby tree on the bank of the reservoir. The Upper Reservoir is only about 2/3 filled after being drawn down for the cranberry harvest, so there is a lot of sand exposed. This bird flew onto the ground, then quickly back to the branch. It repeated this maneuver a number of times and when it stayed still on the sand long enough, I could see that it was an Eastern Phoebe, a winter rarity. The behavior is what first set the alarm bell off, then the darker head and the clear breast. It was too far, at that point for a photo, and by the time I reached the tree I lost it, probably, I thought, in the woods on the other side. 

I continued another mile up to Hanover Pond just at the edge of Fort Dix without seeing another bird, then turned around and took a newly re-opened path that was dug alongside a restored canal that leads to the back of the Reservoir. You can still just get by on the sand and walk back to the road. I was hoping that a different angle would get me another look at the phoebe, and, yes, there it was, just below the bank, jumping from stump to stump, bobbing its tail. What insects this flycatcher can possibly find I can't imagine. Some birds switch to waxy berries in the winter, but I don't know about phoebes. 

I made my way back to the car and added 3 more species--American Robin, Eastern Bluebird, Hairy Woodpecker--for a total of 7. If you can stay below double digits, you win.