They're Away!

[Radar 9:16 p.m. tonight. Look at all the marks over New York, New England and northern NJ. That's our "sending" area for birds tomorrow. Birds are coming.]

Wordless Wednesday

A Very Birdy Weekend in Pictures

 [The coveted Sandwich Tern Lighthouse shot -  today at Cape May Point State Park. Tom Reed (who rumor has it just broke the NJ big year record, way to go Tom!) counted the following: 1755 Common Terns, 1310 Laughing Gulls, 305 Royal Terns, 7 Sandwich Terns, 8 Lesser Black-backed Gulls, and 4 Black Terns. And, it should be noted, that any such counting leaves of all the birds that are out in the rips feeding, and there are many, or were today.]

 [One of the Black Terns settles in over the flock, top bird. Note all the brown birds - hatch year Laughing Gulls, the LAGU's did amazingly well this year, as was evident when I visited the giant colony back of Stone Harbor in July.]

 [Black-bellied Plover in wing molt, over Great Channel near Stone Harbor yesterday. The active molt suggests this bird will winter locally - birds don't molt when they are migrating. My question, though, is how do we know this bird isn't engaged in molt migration - i.e. it's migrated to Stone Harbor, is going to hang out and molt for a while there, and then continue to migrate farther south. This bird, by the way, was fleeing. . . ]

[. . .this. I asked Melissa if she counted any Peregrines at the Cape May Hawk Watch yesterday, and she said one. Michael piped up that he had seen one at Higbee while doing a Monarch census. Wonder if it was this one, it was going south in the very early morning, though it clearly had breakfast on its mind.]

Dicky Birds

 [The bird of the day at Higbee Beach, for me, was Black-and-white Warbler.]

After an hour on the dike, I was pretty sure Higbee was going to s-u-u-uck, pardon the vulgarity. But Tom, Sam and I detected like 2 Yellow Warblers, a few Bobolinks, and not much else. I did have a probably Connecticut Warbler first thing, but don't ask me to explain why I think that's what it was. . . .

Anyhow, I left the dike and began probing the first field while mosquitoes were probing me, in a t-shirt and no bug spray, it's not like I haven't been to Higbee about a zillion times in September and should know better about the mosquitoes. The first field was pretty much dead, with one friendly Ovenbird and a Black-and-white Warbler and not much else.

I almost walked straight back to my truck to head somewhere there might be birds, but opted to check New England Road. Simply walking east from the main Higbee lot is sometimes a good idea. And it sure was today, I hit a little flock of family-grouped chickadees and titmice, and a bunch of birds had coalesced around them, including 4 --winged things, i.e. a good looking female Golden-winged Warbler, a good-looking male Blue-winged, and two hyrbrids, a basic Blue-winged with yellow in the wing bars and a more conventional "Brewster's." These were with a handful of American Redstarts, Black-and-whites, gnatcatchers, Red-eyed Vireos and such. The flock moved back towards the tower field (to the left as you look south from the parking lot), and of the Vermivoras only the Blue-winged with yellow in the wing bars was relocated. The center path, the one between the tower field and the first field, was really pretty birdy, with most of the above species plus local breeders and a single empid that I'm calling a Least Flycatcher. I gather the Golden-winged at least has been around since Wednesday.

I got talking with Leslie, who comes to Cape May from the U.K. every autumn, and while we were enjoying the Black-and-white Warblers, she remarked that Black-and-white was the first wood-warbler she'd ever seen - and she saw it in the U.K.! Funnily, Black-and-white was an almost-first warbler for me (first was, what else, Yellow-rumped). I was a kid fly-fishing in northern NJ, oh my goodness like 35 years ago,  and this funny little black and white striped thing creeping around a streamside tree trunk so intrigued me I went home, found a bird book, looked it up, and never looked back - a birder was born.

Tomorrow I'll be in the kayak, where I know not at the moment, but it's a falling tide, good chance for a free ride out and back on the incoming from somewhere. I'm tempted to make my way to the Brown Booby near Jarvis Sound, but the intracoastal waterway on Labor Day weekend in a kayak? With camera? It's gonna look like the boating scene from Caddy Shack out there by noon, but in theory I'll be off the water and driving home to hole up by then.

[A dicky-bird's dicky bird - hatch year Indigo Bunting at Higbee.]

Hurry Up, Front

Holiday weekend ahead, and of course it looks like the next major migration event will not be until Tuesday, when us working stiffs are back at it. . . aaargh. An approaching high and its leading cold front will be near, but not past, Cape May on Monday. Time to think of a way to scam Tuesday off, or move that front along just a shade, 12 hours earlier will be about right, that would have it crossing Cape May by midnight Sunday night. I do find that NOAA's frontal forecasts tend to predict fronts moving slower than they wind up doing in the end, here's hoping. Regardless, three days of naturalizing, birding, photographing, and dog training ahead. And maybe fishing, I was reminded by a friend that Summer Flounder season extends into September this year.

Turns out the Sooty Terns from PA last weekend would be the first documented for Buck's County, PA, a small consolation for missing the great stuff in Cape May during the hurricane. Gossip has it the large swift seen here was probably a Black Swift, and tonight Kevin Karlson radiated like a revival preacher as he described the two White-tailed Tropicbirds to me as "pure white, like angels." Let's give that another aargh.

It should be mentioned that the bird pictured in the previous post, below, was "designed" by my good friend Roger Horn on an interpretive device at Merrill Creek Reservoir. A woodpecker sparrowduck, I believe.