Whitesbog | Meadowedge Park 2/16--Cackling Goose, Pine Warbler

I started the very cold morning on the Ocean County side of Whitesbog with low expectations, since all the water was frozen again. The most interesting birds I saw for the first part of the walk were 3 Rusty Blackbirds that flew out of the bog across from Big Tank. I saw rusties twice last week, both times behind Union Pond; this is my first sighting there over the line. 

After confirming that the Upper Reservoir was also a sheet of ice, I varied my usual route a little by walking over the Antrim bogs on the road that used to go around a now-breached bog. I remembered that a few years ago, that was the trail where I finally tracked down my FOY Pine Warbler. Birders are superstitious; if you found a good bird in a tree one time, you'll check out that tree every time you pass it. At the intersection there was a flurry of activity with titmice and chickadees flitting in the pines and then, a little higher, the Pine Warbler made its appearance. Pine Warblers use to flagged as "rare" in winter in OC, but they were always here. As my late friend Pete Bacinski explained, since they don't sing in winter, they go unnoticed. They don't even chip, like Yellow-rumps. 

With the rusties, the Pine Warbler, and 23 Tundra Swans on Union Pond in Burlco, I was satisfied with the morning's walk. On Saturday, birding with Jim and Matt, I had twice as many species on my list, but the weather was warmer, and we spent more than 5 hours walking the bogs. 

It was late in the afternoon when I saw an eBird alert that a Cackling Goose was "continuing" at Meadowedge Park down in Barnegat. This is the same park where I saw one last year. The park is a little more than a half hour away from here and having just finished a book I was reading I had nothing better to do before dinner. The advantage is that the park is small, so there aren't a lot of geese to sort through. I found the cackler within a few minutes of arriving, swimming in the tiny pond with about 50 Canada cousins. Then it was just a question of getting the right angle on it to take a photo. After a while the flock got out of the water and moved over to the adjacent lawn, so I was able to get photos of the bird on land too, though it kept disappearing behind other geese. At 4:28 the entire flock of 110 birds (1 cackler, 109 Canada) took off north. Apparently, they didn't go too far, because there are reports from around 5:00 of a Cackling Goose from a tavern on Route 9, less than a mile away. Guess it was drink time for the flock.