Lake Carasaljo 2/15--Greater White-fronted Goose

Greater White-fronted Goose

Another Saturday perambulation around Lake Unpronounceable, with waterfowl the focus.  I was hoping to add Pied-billed Grebe to my list but wound up with something much more interesting. As it happens, where I park, on the south side of the lake is where most of the waterfowl congregate, so I quickly ticked off a bunch of common ducks and of course scads of Canada Geese. I have found that after strolling up to the pontoon bridge that crosses the lake and looking through the amusing variety of domestic ducks that gather in the shallows there, including the resident uncountable Muscovy Duck, the waterfowl thin out and mostly what you find are Ring-bill Gulls standing on the ice. So, when I saw a smaller goose/duck with around 30 Canada Geese, I thought it was probably another domestic duck, but a quick look with the bins showed otherwise--it was a Greater White-fronted Goose, a rarity around here, and probably the most cooperative one I've seen. Not as confiding as the Muscovy, which will walk right up to you and try to eat your shoelaces, but it didn't immediately swim away to the middle of the lake as most geese will do when approached. In fact, after informing a couple of friends by text, I looked up to see that I it wasn't in the water anymore. Thinking it was gone, I turned around and found it on the shore, showing all its field marks. I continued my loop around the lake, and while I didn't have as many species as last week, it was still a respectable number for gray winter's morning.

26 species (+1 other taxa)
Greater White-fronted Goose  1     
Canada Goose  100
Mute Swan  4
Muscovy Duck (Domestic type)  1     
Mallard  4
Mallard (Domestic type)  15
Ring-necked Duck  14
Lesser Scaup  7
Bufflehead  2
Hooded Merganser  21
Mourning Dove  2
Ring-billed Gull  100
American Herring Gull  10
Red-bellied Woodpecker  2
Blue Jay  6
American Crow  1
Tufted Titmouse  2
White-breasted Nuthatch  2
Carolina Wren  1
American Robin  1
House Sparrow  5
Dark-eyed Junco  8
White-throated Sparrow  10
Song Sparrow  4
Red-winged Blackbird  3
Common Grackle  5

Northern Cardinal  4 

Muscovy Duck

Lake Carasaljo | Jackson Liberty HS 2/8--Wood Duck, Horned Lark

Wood Duck

I circumambulated Lake Unpronounceable this morning. One advantage to having a large lake half-frozen is that it concentrates the waterfowl. Of course, most of the waterfowl is comprised of uninteresting Canada Geese, but floating in and out of all those jammed up geese I found my first Wood Ducks of the year, as well as Ring-neck Ducks, Hooded Mergansers, Lesser Scaup, Green-winged Teal, a hen Canvasback and even a couple of big drake Common Mergansers, a first for me at that site and notable to me because the only other example of the species I've seen in county this year was a look at a distant hen on Manahawkin Lake last month.  

Along the areas where the water is frozen, you can concentrate on finding land birds which were comparatively abundant. In all, 3.3 miles yielded 36 species, a veritable bonanza of winter birds for me. 

Canada Goose  200
Mute Swan  2
Wood Duck  2
Mallard  17
Green-winged Teal  3     Drakes
Canvasback  1     
Ring-necked Duck  14
Lesser Scaup  4
Bufflehead  1
Hooded Merganser  14
Common Merganser  2
Mourning Dove  3
Ring-billed Gull  100
American Herring Gull  5
Great Blue Heron  1
Bald Eagle  1
Red-bellied Woodpecker  4
Downy Woodpecker  1
Blue Jay  8
Carolina Chickadee  2
Tufted Titmouse  1
White-breasted Nuthatch  2
Brown Creeper  1
Carolina Wren  5
European Starling  4
Northern Mockingbird  3
American Robin  20
House Sparrow  5
House Finch  1     Heard
Dark-eyed Junco  15
White-throated Sparrow  6
Song Sparrow  8
Red-winged Blackbird  1
Common Grackle  3
Pine Warbler  1     Ground feeding with juncos
Northern Cardinal  4

Then, for the third time this year, I drove over to Jackson Liberty HS to scan the soccer fields. Finally, I found my Horned Larks for the year. As always, it is a wonderment that these fields, and not others all around, attract Horned Larks in large numbers each year. I counted 36 today, which explodes the eBird filter, but I have counted twice that number in the past. Unfortunately, my camera battery died up at the lake when I was trying to document the Canvasback, so I couldn't take any photos of the larks, but then, I have never been able to get a satisfactory picture of those very active birds on those fields. They take off en masse, then settle down just out of camera range and blend in with the brown grass. Walk the field toward them and see previous sentence. 

Common Mergansers

Hooded Mergansers

Lake of the Lilies 2/5--American Coot

American Coot

A little jaunt up to Pt. Pleasant Beach yesterday. For a moment, it was a head-scratcher how American Coot came up as a year-bird on my eBird list so late in the year until I realized that I hadn't been to either Pt Pleasant or the Manasquan Reservoir (the other site I'm sure to see flocks of them) this year. There were plenty of them there, more than the 75 the eBird filter would swallow, but I had no interest in making a 1 x 1 count of diving birds. With diving ducks, grebes, loons, or coots, I always figure that at any given time, about 1/3 of them are under water. 

Redheads (drakes & hens) with coots

Last month, when I was at Lake Carasaljo, I saw one Redhead and I was very happy to find it. Redheads can be a hard get in-county. Ironically, the first ducks I saw at LotL were Redheads, lots of them. Again, diving ducks, but I figured at least 50. But the quantity didn't surpass the quality of the initial find. I was more interested, though, in the 10 Canvasbacks, drakes and hens, that were in the middle of the lake. That's another duck you have to seek out, and LotL isn't usually one of the seeking sites. 

Canvasbacks

Surprisingly, there were no wigeon there, which means I may have lost my opportunity for Eurasian Wigeon which had been a long-staying visitor there since early in the winter. After viewing the lake from 3 sides, I steeled myself for some time on the jetty at Manaquan Inlet. I managed an hour of seawatching, enough time to prove to myself, yet again, that I am either a bad at standing still in one place or that I am unlucky at finding birds on the water--probably a combination of both since what I saw (aside from Red-throated Loon which went as a county bird) was dull compared to the alcids (Razorbills & Dovekies) that another (better/luckier) birder found flying by the jetty earlier that morning. 

My list from Lake of the Lilies, the more interesting of the two:

21 species
Canada Goose  50
Mute Swan  40
Gadwall  15
Mallard  60
American Black Duck  5
Canvasback  10
Redhead  50
Lesser Scaup  49
Hooded Merganser  30
Ruddy Duck  25
Mourning Dove  10
American Coot  75
American Herring Gull  15
Great Black-backed Gull  5
Double-crested Cormorant  1
Great Egret  1
European Starling  10
Northern Mockingbird  3
House Sparrow  20
Song Sparrow  2
Red-winged Blackbird  1

Lake Carasaljo 1/18--Redhead

Ever in search of open water, I went to Lakewood's Lake Carasaljo (or, as I think of it, Lake Unpronounceable) this morning and found that about 500 geese had managed to keep approximately 1/10 of the lake (which is over a mile long) free of ice. In among the geese were a couple of swans, some Mallards, Ring-necked Ducks, and like yesterday at Marshall's Pond, a solo Bufflehead--and this time I looked really carefully. But it wasn't until I walked along the shore a little distance and came to the neat, recently installed pontoon bridge that crosses the lake that I found the duck I'd hoped to see. Mixed in with a slew of white domestic ducks, geese, and one Muscovy Duck (more on it below), was a Redhead, swimming right next to the bridge. 

Redheads are always a welcome sight, right up there with Canvasbacks in my duck pantheon, and I was especially happy because this sighting meant I didn't have to go to an out-of-the-way street in Brick and scan the flocks of scaup in Barnegat Bay for a distant Redhead or two. Last year I got lucky when I found a couple of these ducks floating along off Bay Parkway in Waretown, but they were, as usual, too difficult to photograph. 

I walked up to Route 9 without seeing anything beyond big flocks of Ring-billed Gulls sitting on the ice and few geese munching on a challah someone had thrown on the shore. I returned to the bridge where a young woman was intently watching the ducks. She immediately pointed out the Muscovy Duck to me and asked me what wrong with it. 

"Nothing," I said, "They're just extraordinarily ugly ducks."

"No, no," she said, "There's something wrong with its bill." 

Here's where the really looking comes in. I was pretty sure this was the same Muscovy Duck I'd seen last month which had waddled up to me and tried to untie my boot laces and since Muscovy Ducks are not "countable" I didn't give it much of a look. But indeed, she was right, the top section of its bill was gone and its tongue clear to see resting on the bottom bill. 

"These birds are sometimes not kind to each other," I told her as we watched three gulls squabble over a slice of bread. It looked to me like the Muscovy was out of its element in the wilds of Lakewood.

More interesting to me was that the Redhead had disappeared. It being a diving duck, I gave it some time to come up to the surface, but it was gone. So, as often happens, my life line just happened to intersect with its life line at the right time--for me. 

I crossed over the bridge which leads to a more forested area of the park and then swung around over the rivulet of the Metedeconk River that feeds the lake without seeing much more of interest except for a Brown Creeper at the base of a tree. 

When I got back to my car a woman in the parking lot asked me if I'd seen anything "good."  I told her I'd seen a Redhead.

"Have you been to Lake of the Lilies?" she asked.

"Not recently."

"There are Redheads there."

"Yes, but now I don't have to go there, do I?"

Then she asked me about eagles. It was time to leave.