Birds and Other Nature Sightings

     While having my coffee this morning I watched a decent amount of bird activity in my yard.  This cued me to head over to my favorite spot, Island Beach State Park, to see what last night’s favorable northwest winds brought there.  As I was gathering together my binoculars and camera, I received an alert that a Kirtland’s warbler had been found in Cape May.  I was pretty sure that this was a first state record for New Jersey, and it was.  For a minute I thought about changing my route and head down to Cape May for what would be a new life bird for me.  But I rationalized that the bird might not stick around for the time it would take me to drive the 80 miles to get to it.  So, I continued to Island Beach. The first bird I saw when I started my walk at the park was a Connecticut warbler.  This in itself is a rare migrant in Ocean County.  There is a small window of time in mid to late-September that this plain-looking, ground-foraging bird is normally found, and this was the fourth

     This past Sunday my friend, Captain John, invited me back on his boat for a day of tuna fishing.  While tuna was his target, and I love deep sea fishing as well, I really was hoping to finally find some pelagic birds on the trip.  This day would be the 1,500th consecutive day submitting an eBird checklist and I wanted it to be memorable.  The only reason I am aware of this streak is because my eBird homepage reminds me every day with that stat prominently displayed on the top banner.  Submitting at least one checklist a day sounds easy, since I can list any bird that comes to my backyard feeders.  But I can see how life can get in the way for many people, COVID being one reason.  Lucky for me, I have been able to report at least one bird each day for over four years. The previous two tuna trips provided little in pelagic bird diversity, with only great shearwaters, Wilson’s storm-petrels and a few Cory’s shearwaters to report.  Being the only birder on the boat makes it a little h

     When my younger daughter was attending college in St. Augustine, FL, I got to visit her often.  I spent many days out birding the area while she was on campus.  St. Augustine is on the northeast coast of Florida, roughly a 50-minute drive south from Jacksonville.  It is the county seat of St. Johns County and the oldest city in the United States.  It is one of my favorite places to visit.  There are many birding hotspots nearby and the ones I frequented most often were Anastasia State Park, Masters Tract Stormwater Treatment area on Hub Bailey Road and Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR). Today I look back at one day walking through part of the large GTM NERR expanse.  GTM is located in beautiful Ponte Vedra Beach, about a 40-minute drive from St. Augustine.  GTM covers over 76,000 acres and lists over 350 bird species, dozens of reptiles and amphibians and over 500 plant species.  It was at GTM in 2017 that I found my first pileated woodpecker a