Labor Day weekend: Central Park and Brigantine

Saturday, at an obnoxious 92 degrees, kept me around the house doing yard work.

On Sunday I trekked into Central Park on a day with at best modest migration prospects.  I was lured in by the reports of Red Crossbills the previous two days - a very rare bird for the park in what might be a major irruption year for them.  The Crossbills bad obviously left, despite some time spent searching Hemlocks for them.  Migration was also less than spectacular, with very low numbers of migrants with the exception of one small active patch near the Gill: this yielded Chestnut-sided, Magnolia, Worm-eating, Yellow and Northern Waterthrush.  That was my first Worm-eating Warbler in the park this year - I'd seen or heard others at Sterling Forest and Belleplain SP but as with Cape May Warbler I had struck out on it during spring migration.

On Labor Day itself I went down to Brig again and had a better birding day there than the previous weekend despite some pretty overcast weather.  Three Bobolinks at the start of the one-way section of the wildlife drive.  A Lark Sparrow (my first in NJ and fairly rare in the East) made itself obvious by lurking around the drive itself where the bulky side and white-tipped tail feathers drew my attention.  Several other birders drove right past it and flushed it from the driveway, so it wasn't apparently obvious to everyone.  Double-crested Cormorant numbers were quite high - already on the move with some flocks in the air, there were also a lot of them staging in the area and big flocks were feeding on fish schools along with similarly high numbers of Forster's Terns.  Since it was windy I did unusually poorly with passerines, i.e. no Seaside Sparrows, and the two Ammodramus sparrows that I did see where a nice bonus - Saltmarsh (Sharp-tailed) Sparrows.  While not the first time I've seen them there, they are not an every-trip bird.  Shorebirds were in modest numbers with the typical selection augmented by Ruddy Turnstone, Red Knot (one adult, one juvenile) and three Pectoral Sandpipers.  There were also some interesting terns - a flock on a sandbar with shorebirds had many Royals and a few Caspians.  Later on I saw juvenile Caspians still begging from their parents.  And best of all a juvenile Gull-billed Tern was still being fed by parents that had already started their pre-basic molt and losing their black caps.  A Wild Turkey in the forested area capped off the trip and I did fairly well at avoiding the worst of the Labor Day traffic on the way back home.

Southern NJ, June 12th

I headed out pre-dawn to try my luck with the weather and look for breeding birds in southern NJ. With rather mixed success. At 6:30am at Jake's Landing the typical birds were evident: Osprey with young, Seaside Sparrow, Marsh Wren, vocal Clapper Rails, Willets. I didn't find any Saltmarsh Sharp-tailed Sparrows and the cloud cover was not especially conducive to photography since photo ops and sunny intervals were rather asynchronous.

Headed back through the woodland to the road I heard Pine Warbler, Yellow-throated Warbler, White-eyed Vireo and saw Brown Thrasher. I decided to try and wait out the variable cloud cover and went to the nearby Sunset Rd bridge at Belleplain State Forest. Despite being early in the day the amount of song was limited: Ovenbird, Black-and-white Warbler, an emphatic Acadian Flycatcher were heard but there was no sign of Prothonotary Warbler or Louisiana Waterthrush. Or much else.

I went further down along the Delaware Bay shore and stopped at Kimball's Beach Rd at Cape May NWR to check out shorebirds - there in small numbers and to my eyes just Semipalmated Sandpipers, with no sign of their larger cousins (Dunlin, Sanderling, Turnstone, Knot).

From there I headed down to South Cape May Meadows (SCMM), the Nature Conservancy site near Cape May Point that is more correctly called "The Cape May Migratory Bird Refuge" these days. The weather was overcast so I went to the Concrete Ship and scanned the ocean, picking up a few Northern Gannets heading north. All immatures. At SCMM I left the camera in the car courtesy of unremitting cloud cover and walked around, seeing Piping Plovers getting agitated over every crow and Osprey. There were also Killdeer, American Oystercatcher, Black Skimmer, Least Tern and Foster's Tern. Best birds were the duo of singing Indigo Bunting and Blue Grosbeak at the entrance. Activity was relatively low and the light was pretty bad so I started to work my way north, filling up with gas near the road for Wildwood. I was just turning onto the Garden State Parkway northbound when I caught sight of a clearing patch in my rear view mirror, so turned around at the next exit and headed back to SCMM in the hopes of better light.

At SCMM I had basically the same species, but at least a little sun as the overcast cleared out for a while, and a few birds including Least Terns were relatively cooperative fishing near the viewing platform along northernmost trail. A small number of Common Terns dropped in, and at one point full alternate plumage adults, a first summer Common Tern were on the same sandbar as adult Forster's Tern and first summer Laughing Gulls. An interesting mix of plumages but apart from the Common Terns nothing new was seen on my second go around SCMM. Least Terns were in an active colony on the beach, and American Oystercatcher and Piping Plover chicks were present along the roped off areas of the beach.

Finally I went north once again and visited Brigantine/Forsythe NWR to see if there were any residual migrating shorebirds. While I did get a view of two Clapper Rails bathing in the channel, the number of shorebirds (apart from the breeding Willet) was quite low and consisted of three Greater Yellowlegs and a small group of Semipalmated Sandpipers. Gull-billed Tern was also a new bird for the day. Greenheads were out, but not yet in truly ferocious numbers and the dearth of shorebirds let me keep my car windows up for most of the time. The main benefit of birding Brig on this day is that it delayed my arrival home so that I missed the first half of that rather dire 1-1 draw between the USA and England in the World Cup.

Jamaica Bay, August 16th

I made an early morning trek across the Verrazano Bridge to Jamaica Bay WR in search of shorebirds and some decent photographic opportunities. If anything the water in the East Pond was even higher than on my previous visit, but there was some exposed mud at the south end which is where I started. Shorebird numbers were fairly low, and diversity even lower, with the most novel shorebirds being a single Short-billed Dowitcher and two Spotted Sandpipers. Semipalmated Sandpipers, Semipalmated Plovers, Least Sandpipers and a few Lesser Yellowlegs dominated the activity. I have a lot of photos of those so I gave up early and went to the north end.

Here the water was even higher than on my previous trip - the Sharp-tailed Sandiper one - and the water was up to the edge of the phragmites in most cases. Really quite remarkable conditions for mid-August, when they normally have the pond drawn down. However I was able to pull out a distant Red-necked Phalarope (always a good bird here), a few White-rumped Sandpipers, and two fly-by juvenile Gull-billed Terns. The situation was so odd that I was standing in about 6 inches of water looking at shorebirds and taking photos of White-rumped Sandpipers while looking back toward the phragmites. Thankfully nobody attempted to go past the cove, sparing some exposed mud for roosting and feeding shorebirds. You'd probably sink up to your neck in that section anyway.