Checking the satellite for the area at 5am it pretty much showed that if I did go on a planned trip to Barnegat Inlet, I'd get there just as a wall of cloud rolled in. Having this happen to me once was quite enough, so I deferred the trip to Sunday and did errands and a trip to the local gull watching site: Florence.
Florence, on the NJ side of the Delaware where the river runs roughly east-west, overlooks the series of dumps in Tullytown PA. It's very much in the tidal section of the river although the salinity is probably somewhat brackish. The gulls often roost on the river where you can sort through them. However this has been trickier in recent years with the dump next to the river less active and grassed over. So on Sat morning: few to no gulls. Best birds were: Ring-necked Duck, Common Merganser, Great Cormorant (fly-by) and an immature Bald Eagle who was easy to track because it flushed all the geese, gulls and crows on the landfill.
I decided instead to head over to the PA side, taking the turnpike from near Florence just across the river. And got promptly gouged for a total in $3:40 in tolls. I'm sorry but if you gouge me on the tolls I don't spend $ in your township. Ever. Period. I also ended up being diverted nearly all the way up to the Trenton-Morrisville bridge by a road closure, so it was a total waste of time and $ in doing the driving shortcut. Tullytown is in a particularly ugly part of n.e. Pennsylvania - and given its location perhaps it should call itself the "Gateway to Garbage". But garbage means gulls.
On my detour I passed an incineration plant with a huge flock of roadside Starlings - not merely a few hundred but at least a thousand. Usually they are really traffic-savvy but I could see one or two roadkill ones which the Crows and one or two other Starlings were taking advantage of. Opportunistic cannibalism. There were simply so many that it would have been easy to kill a few had I not slowed down to 15 mph.
I could also see a large circling flock of gulls over a landfill to the west of where I was (i.e. n.e. of Tullytown) and this boded well for my ultimate destination, Falls Township Community Park. The lakes were frozen except for a very small open patch of water, but there was a flock of several hundred gulls there on the ice. Almost immediately I found an adult Lesser Black-backed Gull. Elsewhere Lesser Black-backed is a rare gull. In this general area it's not really that rare and in this flock there were at least 18 adults, outnumbering the Great Black-backed Gulls. I scoped the flock for several sweeps until I decided to warm up in my car and eat a bagel. After a little while I saw a paler gull fly up and got to examine a blotchy pale coffee-colored first winter Iceland Gull for a while. The Florence-Tullytown area usually hosts quite a few Lesser Black-backed Gulls and a few Iceland Gulls of a winter, and one or two Glaucous Gulls are often in the mix. Of interest were some Herring Gulls that had pure white heads and were getting into breeding plumage, although most were pretty strongly marked on the head. Most of the birds in this flock of all species were adults. There were probably other gull flocks nearby on the frozen lakes and impoundments, but its not always easy to find pull overs on public roads in this area.
Falls Twp Community Park is west of US-13 along Mill Creek Road, open dawn-dusk. From Trenton, south on Route 1 and then south on Route 13.
Showing posts with label Florence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Florence. Show all posts
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Florence and Pole Farm: Jan 20th, 21st
While waiting for FedEx Ground to screw up a delivery I birded Florence (NJ) and the Mercer County Park NorthWest (i.e. Pole Farm).
At Florence I arrived to find a lot of ice on the Delaware River at the boat ramp park. This stretch of river heads east-west and of course such is the curse of Florence that the river view overlooks the large Tullytown landfill on the Pennsylvania side. The upside, of course, is that landfills attract a ton of gulls and many of these loaf on the river.
The moment I arrived at the boat ramp park a Great Cormorant flew by and helpfully circled back around to help me clinch the ID - it was starting to molt into breeding plumage so the white flank patch was partially formed. There were quite a few Common Mergansers on the river - probably frozen out further north and from interior lakes. But the main deal is the gulls, many thousands of them, most of them Herring and Ring-billed: there were relatively few Lesser Black-backed Gulls, perhaps less than 10 seen on the entire trip, but I found a pale immature Iceland Gull on the second pass through the flock, and then a second one that kept flying around that was a little darker - towards pale coffee color. After scanning the flock multiple times I went west (i.e. downstream) a few blocks to River's Edge Park where there were very few gulls but luck produced a fly-over third Iceland Gull.
Back at the boat ramp the gull flock had taken flight and moved upstream, so I went to neighboring Roebling and at the park along Riverside Ave I scoped through the chain link fence at the more distant gull flock, (re-)finding two Iceland Gulls and Lesser Black-backed but no Glaucous. I hadn't birded Roebling before but in line with the whole Florence experience the park there overlooked an EPA Super Fund site along the river and seemed to be next to an abandoned manufacturing center. The dilettante nature of birding seems somewhat at odds with the gritty nature of these two towns.
Back at Pole Farm in Lawrenceville a mid afternoon visit yielded the usual suspects: Northern Harrier (2 females, at least one of which was immature), Red-tailed Hawk, a female American Kestrel, American Tree Sparrow and a Short-eared Owl that put in an appearance at a relatively early 3:30pm. Around that time two Eastern Meadowlarks zoomed overhead. Lets hope all these species can hang on for the snow thawing toward the end of the week.
The following morning at Pole Farm I pulled up to find a hovering Red-tailed Hawk, then panned to what I thought was another one before realizing that it was a pale morph Rough-legged Hawk. Possibly the same one that has been in the area for several weeks. I watched this bird for a while as it hunted the field, catching at least one rodent, before it circled high into the air and headed north. I suspect these Rough-legged Hawks cover quite a lot of territory in one day, whereas the Harriers (1 male, 1 female on this visit) seem to cover more limited ground.
(Thursday 22nd: both pale morph and dark morph Rough-legged Hawks were at Pole Farm, with the dark morph showing some aggression toward the light morph. Also there was the female American Kestrel, a single Northern Harrier, Red-tailed Hawk, Dark-eyed Junco and American Tree Sparrow. The Kestrel showed signs of food caching, something I hadn't observed before.)
(Friday 23rd: one apparent male pale morph Rough-legged seen well at Pole Farm, with what appeared to be a second adult female pale morph seen just before I left - it appeared different with a solid black breast band but was only seen at a distance)
At Florence I arrived to find a lot of ice on the Delaware River at the boat ramp park. This stretch of river heads east-west and of course such is the curse of Florence that the river view overlooks the large Tullytown landfill on the Pennsylvania side. The upside, of course, is that landfills attract a ton of gulls and many of these loaf on the river.
The moment I arrived at the boat ramp park a Great Cormorant flew by and helpfully circled back around to help me clinch the ID - it was starting to molt into breeding plumage so the white flank patch was partially formed. There were quite a few Common Mergansers on the river - probably frozen out further north and from interior lakes. But the main deal is the gulls, many thousands of them, most of them Herring and Ring-billed: there were relatively few Lesser Black-backed Gulls, perhaps less than 10 seen on the entire trip, but I found a pale immature Iceland Gull on the second pass through the flock, and then a second one that kept flying around that was a little darker - towards pale coffee color. After scanning the flock multiple times I went west (i.e. downstream) a few blocks to River's Edge Park where there were very few gulls but luck produced a fly-over third Iceland Gull.
Back at the boat ramp the gull flock had taken flight and moved upstream, so I went to neighboring Roebling and at the park along Riverside Ave I scoped through the chain link fence at the more distant gull flock, (re-)finding two Iceland Gulls and Lesser Black-backed but no Glaucous. I hadn't birded Roebling before but in line with the whole Florence experience the park there overlooked an EPA Super Fund site along the river and seemed to be next to an abandoned manufacturing center. The dilettante nature of birding seems somewhat at odds with the gritty nature of these two towns.
Back at Pole Farm in Lawrenceville a mid afternoon visit yielded the usual suspects: Northern Harrier (2 females, at least one of which was immature), Red-tailed Hawk, a female American Kestrel, American Tree Sparrow and a Short-eared Owl that put in an appearance at a relatively early 3:30pm. Around that time two Eastern Meadowlarks zoomed overhead. Lets hope all these species can hang on for the snow thawing toward the end of the week.
The following morning at Pole Farm I pulled up to find a hovering Red-tailed Hawk, then panned to what I thought was another one before realizing that it was a pale morph Rough-legged Hawk. Possibly the same one that has been in the area for several weeks. I watched this bird for a while as it hunted the field, catching at least one rodent, before it circled high into the air and headed north. I suspect these Rough-legged Hawks cover quite a lot of territory in one day, whereas the Harriers (1 male, 1 female on this visit) seem to cover more limited ground.
(Thursday 22nd: both pale morph and dark morph Rough-legged Hawks were at Pole Farm, with the dark morph showing some aggression toward the light morph. Also there was the female American Kestrel, a single Northern Harrier, Red-tailed Hawk, Dark-eyed Junco and American Tree Sparrow. The Kestrel showed signs of food caching, something I hadn't observed before.)
(Friday 23rd: one apparent male pale morph Rough-legged seen well at Pole Farm, with what appeared to be a second adult female pale morph seen just before I left - it appeared different with a solid black breast band but was only seen at a distance)
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