It's spring in Barnegat. The bushes and grasses are thronged with Yellow-rumped Warblers, still clad in drab winter plumage, but ready to assault the great North any day now.
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| Kris and Kristen on the jetty. A younger me would have been out there hopping rock to rock, but it is a nope for an old lady with bad knees and questionable balance. Instead I walked the sand from where I took this shot. |
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| Yellow-rumped Warbler |
The sea there is likewise thronged with wintering ducks and geese that would trigger rare bird alerts here in NY and instantly bring flocks of birders, rivaling those of YRWA, to stand and stare while madly clicking camera shutters.
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| Purple Sandpiper...he knows exactly how cute he is! |
My dear friend and Best Birding Buddy, Kris, invited me to share a quick trip there to view these amazing creatures, so we took off at o'dark-thirty Friday morning. On the way down we speculated about what we wanted to see most. I was hoping for Great Cormorants, and we both settled on Purple Sandpipers as grail birds so to speak. I had only encountered either on Bird Wise or on Cornell birding courses.
Once we found our way through the tangle of going south in order to go north engendered by the whole just one bridge to Long Beach Island thing, we were instantly greeted by a whole flock of Brant, one of those geese that get folks all excited here in this area. They were grazing on lawns and strolling in the streets, much like our local Canada geese do here. We were out of the car and pointing the cameras in seconds.
Soon, we met the other Kristen, an experienced birding guide who generously shared tips on where to go and what to see, as well as accompanying us out on the jetty at the lighthouse...well, K and K did the jetty. I walked out far enough to see the rock hopping that would be involved in going on the actual rocks. Not being a penguin, I hustled down to the sand route....
Within a short time we had spotted Great Cormorants drying their wings on another nearby jetty, and Purple Sandpipers hip-hopping and scurrying to forage among the stones. The latter were even more beautiful than I had imagined and tickled me....well, purple, not pink.
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| Red-throated Loon |
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| Red-breasted Merganser |
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| American Herring Gull |
Among other notables was a Red-throated Loon that swam up right next to us, floating on a breaker just as it hit the beach. There were so many amazing birds that I can barely describe them. Mergansers, Long-tailed Ducks, all three scoters, a Gadwall, scads of American Black Ducks and Mallards. Gulls abounded, mostly the three common species here, Herring, Ring-billed and Great Black-backed. We found 31 species just on that walk.
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| American Black Ducks, strolling with a Gadwall drake |
Later we went to Holgate to seek the Snowy Owl spending the winter there. Hiked 2.84 miles down a sand spit reaching out into the water, almost to the very dip, only to be unable to find it. It was less than thrilling to get a rare bird alert a short time after we trekked back to the car...someone had seen it almost exactly where we had been right after we left. It taunted us all weekend, being spotted off and on... Although it would have been nice to see it there were so many other birds to make up for it. Day two was even more amazing...TBC
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