Brielle 6/1--Garganey

I was walking through the mist and fog near the jetty at IBSP this morning when my phone started pinging with messages from friends about a Garganey in an obscure marshy area up in Brielle. Not much I could do about it right then. I have to be up in Monmouth tomorrow, so I was kind of planning to go look for it early in the morning. But once I got home, ate some lunch, watched some Mets, I began to get itchy for the bird. I'd only seen one before, when we were in South Africa. Mike, Kim, and I took an early morning walk in St. Lucia and Kim spotted a hen. So, it was on my list, tucked in with a couple of hundred other life birds. But it was definitely BVD.

I was just about to launch myself off the couch and drive up to Manasquan/Brielle/Sea Girt (it all more or less blends together up there), when I realized that Shari had slept in that morning in SA and I didn't think she had the duck on her life list. I checked her eBird account (I have to keep two accounts running, since she has no interest in eBird itself) and, indeed, it would be a lifer for her. 

However, she wasn't here. What to do? I tracked her phone and saw she'd be home shortly, so I impatiently waited--now I really wanted the bird. When she pulled into the driveway I said, "Do you want to go see a lifer?"

"Sure," she replied.

"Do you want to know what it is?" 

She thought for a second or two, then said, "OK, what is it?" 

Shari doesn't care about year list, month list, day list, country list, state list, county list, patch list, backyard list. The only list she gives priority to is Life List. The rest of the time she's just enjoying the birds without worrying about what listing categories they fall into. She's like a vegetarian who makes an exception for burgers. 

It's about a 40-minute drive up to Manasquan from here, then a little longer since neither Google or Apple navigation was aware that one of the drawbridges was out and we had to feel our way over to the Manasquan/Brielle Little League fields, from which, peering through a chain link fence that separates them from a National Guard training facility, you could see the marsh the duck was in. Except when we got there, 30 or so birders were staring glumly through the fence where no duck was dabbling. In the rush to get on the road, I'd forgotten to take our scope out of my car and put in Shari's, but that wasn't going to be a problem as there were plenty of scopes and familiar faces waiting for the Garganey to re-emerge from the reeds.

Which it finally did after about 15 minutes. Our buddy Bob Auster was there, and we peered at the duck through his scope, but it was easily seen with binoculars and even naked eye. The marshy area was enclosed with a wood fence, so we were actually viewing the bird through two fences. Still, I got a decent doc shot by putting my camera lens against the metal fence and shooting through the diamond-shaped opening. You can tell its a Garganey.

Shari had her Life Bird. And I had, let's see...Year Bird, Hemisphere Bird, ABA Area Bird, Country Bird, State Bird, County Bird.