Wesley Lake 6/11--Cliff Swallow

I know this looks more like a carp than a bird, but it's a Cliff Swallow

Shari was up in Asbury Park yesterday for an event and afterwards went to Wesley Lake to check out the Cliff Swallows that I told her were being reported there. Since my scout found them easily enough, I drove up there this morning after the rain stopped and walked on the bridge near the pedal boats. The swallows were not hard to find nor identify with their "headlights" on the foreheads, but they were impossible to photograph. Well, not exactly impossible since I did get one blurry picture by essentially sticking my camera out and letting it take pictures by itself.

The swallows are apparently nesting beneath the footbridge over the lake. They're well-known for doing this on bridges over the Raritan River in the western part of the state, but in Monmouth County they're considered rare. For me they're rare no matter what. The only other time I've seen them in the state was one of the few times I decided to be patient and looked at every swallow of about 500 on a utility wire down on Great Bay Blvd and came up with 498 Barn Swallows and 2 Cliffs.

Dragon, Swan, Duck, Flamingo, Heron, Black Swan

Wesley Lake, one of the many artificial ponds along the North Shore, is more attractive than most of them with a substantial stone footbridge that connects Asbury Park with Ocean Grove. Ocean Grove started life as, and still is, a Methodist Camp Ground. Hence the name of the lake, named after the founder of Methodism. When I was a kid visiting Bradley Beach to the south, we used to walk through Ocean Grove to get to Asbury Park and its pinball machines. We called it "Ocean Grave" since the whole town shut down on Sundays, including the ocean.  The pedal boats, I note, are moored on the Asbury Park side.

Least Tern on nest

I drove 10 minutes south to the Shark River Inlet and took a walk around the tern breeding colony. I was hoping for something rare but instead saw more Least Terns in one place than I've ever seen before. I counted 25 sitting on nests, which are little more than scrapes in the sand, and when they took to the air there were at least twice that many. There were a few Black Skimmers and a couple of oystercatchers to round out the nesters there. Another birder there said she had a tern with a black bill and I was hoping for Sandwich Tern but it just turned out to be a molting, or molted, Common Tern or perhaps a bird that never shed its immature plumage. Whatever it was, it wasn't rare.