Colliers Mills 1/9--Red-headed Woodpecker

 This morning I decided it was time to play "Find the Red-headed Woodpecker" at Colliers Mills. It's a game I like to play because I almost always win. And they're beautiful birds to see. Red-headed Woodpeckers are not considered "rare" in Ocean County, but there are really only two places you can reliably find them--Colliers Mills and Cloverdale Farm. Occasionally one shows up at Island Beach in the spring, but the key word here is "reliably." What's funny to me is that over in Burlington County I can think of 4 or 5 spots where they're pretty easy to find and yet there the bird is listed as rare. 

The way I play the game is to walk over to the woods north of Success Road and serpentine around, playing the call on my phone a couple of times. Then I scan the dead the trees and walk through all the leaf litter and after 5 minutes I'm ready to give up. Then I find one flying from one tree to another. Today that's what happened, except after the first one, another one followed it into the same tree. And then another. While the birds aren't considered rare, the eBird filter doesn't "think" you should see more than two, which is silly, since they breed there and the word "breed" implies >2. After I watched them for a few minutes go from oak to oak (the ground was littered in acorns), I started back out. Before I got to the gate that gives onto the field, I found a fourth in a different stand of tree. The 6th 
Law of Birding says, "You only need one," so this would have amounted to showing off, if I hadn't seen a fifth bird later in the morning in the trees east of the police firing range. Five Red-headed Woodpeckers does seem excessive. The 7th Law of Birding states that "No matter where you stand, the woodpecker is always on the other side of the tree," which explains the low quality of my photos.

I made my usual loop around Turnmill Lake and the Borden's Mill Branch pond, where there were no waterfowl except for a flyover flock of geese since the water was still frozen despite the relatively warm temperatures the last couple of days. It wasn't until I emerged on Hawkin Road that I added anymore birds to the year list: a Red-tailed Hawk was hunting over the pone on Hawkin, a Brown Creeper amongst the juncos, and quite a number of Chipping Sparrows in the brush at the start of the road, another count that, because they're supposed to be scarce in winter, broke the eBird filter--5 was acceptable, 10 too many

Only 20 species for the walk, but I won the game, again. 

Canada Goose  18
Turkey Vulture  1
Red-tailed Hawk  1
Red-headed Woodpecker  5    
Red-bellied Woodpecker  9
Blue Jay  16
Carolina Chickadee  9
Tufted Titmouse  1
Golden-crowned Kinglet  1
White-breasted Nuthatch  5
Brown Creeper  1     
Carolina Wren  4
European Starling  15
Eastern Bluebird  3
American Robin  2
American Goldfinch  1
Chipping Sparrow  10     
Dark-eyed Junco  25
White-throated Sparrow  2
Yellow-rumped Warbler  1