Wordless Wednesday: Flight of the Sea Robin

Sounds of Summer, Part Two

[Home sweet home.]

A sound of summer (the audible kind) I forgot to mention, how I know not, is the piping whistle of Osprey. Taylor Sound, between the parkway and Wildwood, should be renamed "The Place of Ospreys," since it is ringed with Osprey nests: nests on duck blinds, on derelict cabins, and on more conventional Osprey towers. And the birds pipe constantly, or whenever one of their number flies over with a fish, which is nearly the same thing as the young near flying stage and insistently beg for food from busily hunting adults.

 [Shorebirds will often stretch their wings when nervous, a sign they are about to fly. These Semipalmated Sandpipers foraged along a muddy edge in Taylor Sound this morning.]

We saw many shorebirds while kayaking today: Whimbrels feasting on fiddler crabs; peep probing worms from the muckiest mud you can imagine; Spotted Sandpipers teetering on sod banks; Greater Yellowlegs chasing fish. All the shorebirds were adults; the first juvenile shorebirds (not counting the local Willets) will probably be Least Sandpipers appearing around August 1.

 [Semipalmated Sandpiper above, Least below. Compared to Semi, Least is browner above, small-headed and hunched (I swear they even look hunched when flying), finer and more drooped bill, and yes, there are those yellow legs. These two birds were making their way across the same flat, feeding within feet of each other, and here then is another clue: which one kept its toes dry?]

 [Spotted Sandpiper. The relatively sparse spotting, and small size of the spots, suggests a male; females have larger, rounder spots, and more of them - of course that's breeding plumage, call it unspotted sandpiper in non-breeding plumage. Witmer Stone found nests of this species in Cape May, but breeding in south coastal NJ was not proven during the NJ breeding bird atlas. They nest elsewhere in NJ, and begin appearing as migrants in late June, confounding assessment of breeding status.]

[Makes you glad they're only a couple inches across. . . and wish you were a Whimbrel. The decurve of a Whimbrel's bill matches the curve of Fiddler Crab burrows. Night-herons love these things, too, as do gulls.]

The Sounds of Summer

 [Herring Gull chick, west of Avalon today.]

I don't mean sounds you hear, though there are plenty of them: the laughing of gulls, keee-aaahrr's of Common Terns, drone of flies, music of the ice cream truck driving the streets of North Cape May, crash of waves and laughter of children at the beach. The sounds I mean have water in them, at least at high tide: sound, noun: an inlet, bay, or recessed portion of the ocean.

Of both sounds, Cape May has many. Of the aquatic kind, Great, Grassy, Jarvis, Jenkins, Richarson, Townsend (who were these people?) fill and empty with the twice daily tides. Today I paddled Stite's Sound and down to Townsend's Inlet; tomorrow it will be Taylor Sound, on a falling tide, passing the marsh shack  hosting an Osprey nest on the roof, the one, I fancy, that Witmer Stone stayed in 100 years ago or so. He wrote of visiting such a place, and the location matches, roughly, though without maintenance a shack in the marsh falls down several times over in the span of a century. According to the plan, I'll pass "Stone's" shack again on the way back in as the tide rises and gives me a lift to the landing. That's the theory. We'll see what the wind says, but one thing I can tell you is you don't want to wind up in a kayak fighting both an outgoing tide and the wind at the same time. At least not in the narrow channels, where the tidal flow can outstrip a small outboard or weak kayaker. In bigger channels, the water spreads a bit and you can go against the flow, but it's not much fun.

The sounds are shallow, so shallow that at low tide they won't float a kayak in places - which means they won't float a boat, or, hallelujah, a jet ski. But on the mud left behind at low tide there are shorebirds, foraging gulls, terns, egrets, and night-herons, and the myriad creatures that are the supermarket for these birds.

More on the shorebirds later. Today I checked in on another gull colony I know, a large gull colony, by which, as Tony Leukering made me clarify, I mean a colony of large gulls: mostly Herring, a few Great Black-backeds.

[ Herring Gulls on an isolated sandy spit, higher than the surrounding marsh and safe from flooding, with high-tide bush for the chicks to hide under, and shelter from the swelter of late.]

[Herring Gull egg. 2 to go; the norm is 3 per clutch. ]

[Mobile Herring Gull fledgling.]

[Still older juvenile Herring Gull, with parent.]

Mike Crewe told us over crab cakes and beer tonight that in the U.K., gull chicks are banded by teams of people,because the chicks so effectively disappear when approached. And it's true: there had to be dozens of chicks in the gull colony I visited this morning, yet a quick but careful walk-through yielded none apparent to the eye. Mike said the teams use radios, with observers guiding the banders: "Okay, put your hand down next to that shrub, the chick is right there." I stepped away from the colony to watch, and sure enough, chicks started reappearing from their hiding places, including the one pictured above.

[This group of Black-crowned Night-herons accreted around a salt marsh pool as the tide fell, concentrating prey.]

 [Clappers, Clappers everywhere. I could have reached out and picked this Clapper Rail up.]

[Rigged for battle. The black bag is a waterproof bicycle pannier adapted for kayaking, and holds the camera. I would prefer a camo kayak, but anyone who's been out in south Jersey coastal waters knows you want to be visible, lest a jet ski or inattentive boater run you down. . .]

It was 94 degrees next to the water near Avalon when I came off about 10:00 a.m. The outside thermometer reading, according to my truck, peaked at 99 in the center of the Cape May Peninsula a little later, dropping again as I got close to the bay. Who knows what the high was; mowing the lawn at midday left me soaking, and the birds visited the water drip constantly, lawnmower running nearby or not. I got on the water before sunup this morning and swam several times to cool off, watching schools of silversides flee in front of me.

These sounds teem with life. When people ask me why Cape May is so good for birds, that's part of the answer.

Wordless Wednesday on Thursday

More Marsh Time

 [Short-billed Dowitcher flexing its prehensile bill, on the sod banks of Jenkins Sound Sunday]

It is SO worth getting up at 4:00 a.m., even if you pay for it by dark. On the water by 5, sun not even up, not a soul in sight - or, on the contrary, many souls, those of birds. Dowitchers down from Labrador, Whimbrels from farther (Alaska, even, maybe), Yellow-crowned Night-herons crouching in shady salt creeks stalking fiddler crabs. That was my Sunday morning, foraying into Jenkins Sound and then circumnavigating Nummy Island by kayak.

[Thanks to that flexible bill, dowitchers swallow most of their food without lifting their bills from the mud, so we never get to see what they're eating (a variety of invertebrates), but marine worms like this small bloodworm are pulled to the surface.]

This was my first visit of the year to the massive Laughing Gull colony, or colonies, on the marshes west of Stone Harbor and Wildwood. The gulls nest on piles of wrack, or build their own piles. Something like 10,000 birds are in this colony, the world's largest, and it is a cacaphony indeed.

[Laughing Gulls reserve a special call for mates bringing nesting material: ooo - ooo -ooo ooOOoo. Oh honey, you're going to get lucky tonight ;>).]

[I was surprised to find incomplete clutches of one and two eggs at this late date. The normal is three eggs for Laughing Gulls.]

[Besides the eggs, there were, however, Laughing Gull chicks in various stages of development. These chicks still wore a lot of down.]

[An older Laughing Gull chick flattened itself motionless in the Spartina as I paddled past on the high tide, able to peer over the channel banks to see the nesters.]

[Older still, this Laughing Gull fledgling could fly a short ways, though it made no attempt to flee the kayak.]

[Paddling around in the marsh at dawn is the best way I know to get good views of Clapper Rails.]

[Raucous Boat-tailed Grackles foraged out on the marsh, amid the Spartina patens and glasswort.]

[Hmm, these Willets are in wing molt - which means they must be Western Willets, which breed in the upper midwest, moving south by first heading east to the coast. Eastern Willets don't commence molting until they leave North America, or so says The Shorebird Guide.]

[A juvenile Eastern Willet, with a trace of down on the head and very neat, uniform - and new - feathers. The bill is not full-length yet.]