Sunset - and Sunrise - Sunday

 [Above, Garden State Parkway tonight. Below, Forsythe NWR one morning last week.]

Golden Eagle Ruminations

[Those familiar with the Wildlife Drive at Forsythe will recognize this aerial view of the West/Vogt pool. I was at the tower at Gull Pond when scanning revealed a suspicious raptor high and waaaaaaaay out, two miles out as calculated using Running Map.]

I didn't have a lot of time Saturday morning, but before heading home from Forsythe NWR (to shop for a new refrigerator, oh, yay), I made a quick check on the immature Little Blue Heron that spent the week near the Leed's Eco-trail Boardwalk (it was not present), then swung out to the Gull Pond Tower for a quick scan from the truck. A micro-dot (nano-dot?) soared far to the north, well beyond the North Dike, but it stopped me. At first there was no thought process beyond, "Golden." A presumptuous assertion on a bird perhaps two miles away.

It's got to be huge or I couldn't see it that far away.

Ohhhh (I think I said it out loud) - it just came up into a dihedral. (It was really windy and that messes with raptor shapes. This bird was in a slight glide a lot of the time, taking in the sails as it were, but periodically the wings would flatten out and the wing tips would come up, and stay up.)

It's holding it, can't be a bald.

Wingbeat's not right for a bald. Stiff, doesn't flex down, shallow. Rapid upstroke at the end of a series of beats (kind of like a Sandhill Crane's upstroke) and stays up.

It's dark, hard dark, colder than a bald.

A second bird came in and joined it. Flat-winged. Sometimes flexed downward. Not as dark.

I was in the truck this whole time, elbows propped on the door jam, looking through Zeiss 8's. Finally enough was enough, and I hopped out, grabbed the scope and quickly set it up on the tailgate. I could only zoom to 40X because of the wind and distortion, but 40X showed a short-headed (short necked might be more accurate) eagle, flashing light on the nape (even at 1.5-2 miles), discrete white patches on the wing, and an obvious white band at the base of the tail. Slimmer of wing next to the Bald Eagle, which had  an obvious big, long head/neck.

The mystery is that before all the calculations I knew what it was. Which means what? Not that I'm anything special. Just that I've been birding long enough to finally see enough Golden Eagles to recognize one.

No smarter than my dog, who knows what my truck looks like.

Housekeeping: About the New Gadget, and On Commenting

First, on leaving comments on this blog. Please do! But if you leave a comment, be aware that it will not appear immediately - I have the comments on filter to make sure no whackos leave inappropriate material. Thus far, nothing like that has happened.

You may have noticed the new feature on the right side of the blog, right under the Twitter feed: a "gadget" displaying bird sightings from Cape May County and nearby. This cool gadget was created using code developed by Zachary DeBruine, who was recently featured as the eBirder of the month. Here's what it does:

The left hand "sightings" tab displays all birds reported to eBird in the last 7 days in Cape May County and nearby. Use the scroll bar in the gadget to go through them (on an iPhone, the whole list is displayed).

What I did (with help - thanks BC!) is create a circle wide enough to encompass the whole county plus most of the "good stuff" in Cumberland, i.e. places like Heislerville and Turkey Point, and punched the lat/long of the center of the circle, with its radius (35 km) into Zach's gadget.

The center tab, Rarities, displays all the rare birds reported anywhere in NJ in the last 7 days. The right hand tab displays the same birds as the left hand tab. The idea would have been to create a filter for the left hand tab so on that you wouldn't have to scroll past Canada Goose and starling to find more interesting species, but that apparently isn't possible right now. It also isn't possible to re-order the birds, for example taxonomically.

With those two pitfalls, it's still a pretty cool gadget for the south Jersey birder, because you can scroll through to find sightings of interest, and then, if you hit the little green arrow pointing right of the sighting, you'll get a map of where the bird was seen along with who saw it (and if you click on the map, it will open a new tab with a larger map). Click on the sightings tab to return to the species list.

One other note: the gadget does not update instantly as new checklists are entered into eBird. I'm actually not sure how fast it does update, but it seems to at least within a day.


Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday - New Yard Bird

In Theory and In Practice

[The four winter gulls: Ring-billed, Herring and Bonaparte's in the foreground; a Great Black-backed in the distance. Miami Beach - the one Delaware Bay, not Florida - on Sunday.]

It seemed like a good plan, in theory. Dress in warm camo clothes, nestle into the edge of a dune where the falling tide exposes a sand spit projecting into Delaware Bay, and wait for gulls to congregate on the spit at point blank range, camera at the ready to document all the rarities that appeared. . .

In practice it was a great way to watch gulls floating and flying way out in the bay, and occasionally catch the distant wailing of courting Black Scoters.

That was Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon, I had another theory. I like being at the mouths of inlets as the falling tide nears low.  The theory is the tide sweeping out of the inlet sweeps with it food that might attract fish, and birds that eat fish. Also, if the inlet has a jetty, the falling tide exposes the intertidal zone, the food-encrusted rocks where sandpipers and gulls can pick and probe. For birds that dive, the food on low tide is that much closer to the surface, a shorter dive to the lunch table.

The afternoon theory worked better. I hiked down to the Cold Spring Inlet, the southern terminus of Two Mile Beach, where the Cape May Canal enters the Atlantic. A small but diverse foraging "frenzy" had formed near the tip of the Cold Spring jetty, with 60 or so Bonaparte's Gulls dipping and swooping over a dozen Red-throated Loons, a few Common Loons, and, finally, a Razorbill. The birds were far, and time was short to make my very cautious way out to the end of the jetty, a trek not to be taken lightly, this jetty is way more treacherous than the one at Barnegat Light.

So I passed, contenting myself with scoping the distant birds and photographing the closer Ruddy Turnstones, which did indeed accumulate on the exposed rocks, along with a few Purple Sandpipers and several hundred "large gulls," which in our neck of the woods means almost all Herring Gulls. There were the usual Great Cormorants at the inlet, and a dozen or so American Oystercatchers on the mud at the entrance to the Cape May Harbor. All three scoters were represented, including a somewhat unusual flock of 12 White-winged Scoters with a few Surfs mixed in.

[A bird that could be used in the definition of the adjective "harlequin" - Ruddy Turnstone, Cold Spring jetty on Sunday.]