Psychotic chasing: Cape Cod

While I'm not an obsessive chaser, the lists that I take seriously are my Life List, Year List and Central Park List.  I'm willing to travel a little distance to plug holes in my Life List, especially now that I'm at 675 and new birds are difficult to find to advance the goal of reaching 700.

So it didn't escape my notice that a Little Egret had been found the previous weekend on Cape Cod.  Although New England is a lot more compact than, say, the American west, it's still 325 miles of driving one way to get from central NJ to Hyannis.  That's a pretty long round trip and as I'm increasingly older also toward the upper limit of what I'm tempted to do in one day.

Nevertheless, Little Egret is something I've tried for and struck out on in the past, and it would make a nice "pairing" with the Western Reef-Heron in Brooklyn (July 2007).

So off I went up a dark and wet I-95 all the way from NJ, through NY, CT, RI and finally MA for a fifth state pre-dawn, ending up at Hyannis on the south side of Cape Cod around 8:45am.  I rolled into the first of two sites that the bird frequented - and where it was seen multiple times the previous day - whereupon an especially helpful birder told me it was over at the other location only a couple of miles west.  Within 10 minutes of looking, I was watching a Little Egret hunt down small fish at the outflow of a marsh using a foot-trembling method to disturb the mud and/or flush the fish.  All the expected ID marks where there - a more massive bill with gray-ish lores, greenish legs with yellowish feet, overall structure intermediate between Snowy and Great Egret.  While the ID is not trivial at range, this was a good look at a bird that could not be confused with a Snowy Egret.

If the Egret wasn't remote-enough odds, it was standing right next to a Black-headed Gull, itself a relatively rare bird in the USA.  Both of these species I've seen in Britain (memorably I once had about eight Little Egrets in GB in one day in February) where Little Egret have become far more numerous than when I used to live there and where Black-headed Gull is abundant.

In retrospect that quick and easy success with the egret (modulo 5.5 hours of driving) should have led me to turn around and head toward home, not least of all because it was drizzling with low cloud the entire day.  Instead I rolled the dice and when 50 miles further up the Cape to Provincetown in search of Thick-billed Murre.  I'd seen the murres this past summer in AK, but wanted a look in the East.  This was a trip I'd considered during the previous winter - and almost executed - but always delayed it due to bad weather and the sheer distance involved.  Provincetown appears to be one of the better mainland sites for finding TB Murre, however luck wasn't quite with me.  I had three Razorbills at MacMillan Wharf along with Common Loons and one Red-throated, Red-breasted Mergansers, American Black Duck, both Cormorant sp, but no murres.  Race Point at the northern edge of the cape had limited visibility (fog, rain) but had Northern Gannet and one Black Scoter.  Herring Cove on the western tip added White-winged Scoter, a quick return trip to the harbor netted exactly the same species, so I headed back down the cape to check First Encounter Beach where the low tide precluded finding any water bird within the visible range, and Corporation Beach in Dennis where there were a good select of water birds just off the breakwater (new: Horned Grebe) but no alcids.  I did have a single fly-over Redpoll here but simply could not find it in the dark gray sky.  The southerly wind that brought the moisture and relatively mild conditions wasn't exactly conducive to winter finch flight so I was unable to track down any (other) Redpolls or Crossbills.

Heading back to Hyannis once more and finding that the Egret had become elusive (various birders were looking for it) at either of its regular spots, so I decided to make an early start on the return trip, and left the cape around 2:30pm to start the 6+ hour drive home in rather heavier traffic conditions than the early morning outbound trip.

Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) - US bird #676

Delaware Little Egret - not - June 14th

Emboldened by my successful run for the Prime Hook Wood Sandpiper a few weeks back I made a trip to familiar territory of the Bombay Hook NWR near Smyrna, DE in search of the reported Little Egret. I'd seen a few Little Egrets at my old UK childhood birding patch in January (much to my surprise), but I'd never seen one in the USA.

Little Egret looks a lot like a white Western Reef-Heron, and in fact one may be a subspecies of the other - the taxonomy is in flux. The most pressing problem is telling it from Snowy Egret, with which it shares similar overall size, black legs with yellow feet, and of course an overwhelming whiteness. Telling Little Egret from Snowy is not an issue in the UK. However here in the USA more subtle clues are needed. For one thing Little Egret has a rather thicker and longer bill - it presents as heavier than the Snowy's. The other thing, and something shown by the Delaware bird, is the presence of two thick plumes on the back of the head in contrast to the wispier plumes of the Snowy Egret. A recent post on BIRDWG01 by Alvaro Jaramillo also mentioned that the breast plumes were thicker and coarser in Little Egret. Of much less use, in general, are the bare parts since Little Egret can show yellow lores and the feet have a variable color too. In the case of this specific individual the Little Egret's lores were dull blue-gray so this was another ID mark for this bird, although perhaps not for the species in general.

Getting to Bombay Hook around 8am the tide was high, which I figured would push the small egrets into the pools. Barn Swallows and Purple Martins were at the visitor center. The first pool contained a decent number of Great Egrets, showing just how variable the size of a Great Egret can look when you're looking for small white herons. There were one or two Great Blue Herons as well. In the second pool, Shearness, there were quite a few of both those heron species, Black-necked Stilt and some nervous Killdeer. At the far end of the pool there were a couple of Snowy Egrets. Then onto Bear Swamp pool where there were almost no herons at all. I alternated between Shearness and Bear Swamp while I was there, because this is where the bird was seen. After 3 hours of covering the 3 pools at the reserve, and I wasn't the only one doing this, I gave up and came home. I've seen no sightings of the Little Egret from the past weekend, either.

Nice sightings while I was there were a couple of in-flight Clapper Rails, 5 Bald Eagles (one adult, 4 immatures), several Black-necked Stilts, Marsh Wren. Very few terns were in evidence - perhaps on breeding colonies elsewhere. Other birds included Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Indigo Bunting, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Eastern Kingbird, Common Yellowthroat and Swamp Sparrow. I attempted a wander down the boardwalk trail to look for other passerines but was literally bombarded by biting insects within the first 50 yards (the greenheads grew more enthusiastic as it got hotter through the morning) so I gave up on that. Not a bad trip, 2 hours each way from Princeton and some relatively cheap gas found at Carney's Point on the NJ side, but ultimately the first failed chase after ten successful ones got me from 599-609.

Can't get them all.