Great Bay Blvd 3/29--Black-crowned Night-Heron

You can find them all over but where is the most reliable area? Great Bay Blvd. So that's where I went. And while there's a very good chance of seeing them in the marsh, where is the most reliable place to find them? Any of the stands of cedar by the bridges. So that's where I looked. And just walking by, I flushed 4 Black-crowned Night-Herons, one adult, one immature, and two too obscured to tell. The flushing, though, was the problem. I couldn't find one perched in the roost. The immature in the photograph above kept looking like it wanted to land again but never could decide to do it and I finally lost it as it hunkered down int he marsh. 

The cedars are also the place to look for Yellow-crowned Night-Herons, but then we're getting ahead of ourselves. They don't seem to appear before the summer, although they start nesting around this time down in Cape May County at the Ocean City Welcome Center roost, though last year it looked like they were getting pushed out by the White Ibises. Shari & I will make a trip down there soon and report back. 

It was moderately busy along the boulevard, though the shorebirds were limited to oystercatchers and yellowlegs. I was hoping some of the dowitchers from Brig would fly the short distance over the marsh but they hadn't. 

31 species
Brant  60
Canada Goose  2
American Black Duck  7
Green-winged Teal  30
Bufflehead  22
Red-breasted Merganser  16
Mourning Dove  3
American Oystercatcher  4
Greater Yellowlegs  6
American Herring Gull  15
Great Black-backed Gull  2
Red-throated Loon  1
Common Loon  3
Double-crested Cormorant  1
Black-crowned Night Heron  4
Snowy Egret  4
Great Egret  16
Great Blue Heron  2
Osprey  2
Northern Flicker  2
Eastern Phoebe  1
Fish Crow  2
Tree Swallow  5
Golden-crowned Kinglet  4
American Robin  5
Chipping Sparrow  2
Dark-eyed Junco  1
Song Sparrow  7
Red-winged Blackbird  30
Boat-tailed Grackle  6
Yellow-rumped Warbler  2