Birds and Other Nature Sightings

     This past Labor Day weekend I went on a tuna fishing trip with my friend who captain’s the boat.  In addition to catching a yellowfin tuna and several mahi mahi, we were entertained throughout the day with many humpback whales and a few fin whales surfacing all around the fishing grounds.  We were near the Hudson Canyon and the whales were not shy with sharing their feeding spot with the fishing vessels.   The whales were very active, surfacing very close to our boat and others.  On deep dives, they raised their tails well clear of the water.  I took many photographs and, as I have been doing for over a year now, submitted some to Happywhale.com .   Happywhale uses a database of photos, particularly humpback whale tails (flukes), to identify individual whales.  Combined with encounters submitted by other observers, you can track an identified whale.  Each humpback’s fluke is unique, like a human fingerprint.   Happywhale originally focused only on humpback whales but is expandin

     On Thursday I had a chance to get out on my kayak and check out the sedges of the Marine Conservation Zone at the southern end of Island Beach State Park.  At low tide I have the opportunity to walk around the exposed mud flats where many returning migrant shorebirds gather.  I started a little later than I had originally planned.  The tide was already incoming so while I was scanning flocks of shorebirds, gulls and terns, I had to also keep an eye on my beached kayak before the rising water could take it away.   This is a good time of year to find some rarities.  In the past there have been sandwich terns , roseate spoonbill , reddish egret , Wilson’s phalarope , American golden plover and Hudsonian godwit among others.  No rarities this time, however.  In about an hour I saw scattered, around the mud flats, sandbars and marshes, increasingly large mixed flocks of gulls: great black-backed , herring , laughing , ring-billed and even a Bonaparte’s ; terns: Caspian , royal , For