Black Guillemot, Barnegat Inlet - 11/5/2023

     Yesterday morning I heard my phone making the familiar text message pings.  I wasn’t in a rush to read or answer them.  But since my wife brought the phone over to me, I checked the messages.  Friends were advising me of a rare bird at Barnegat Inlet.  The bird sighting was posted on a GroupMe chat, but I had left that group months ago because of too much nonsense.  A smaller group of us now keep each other up on such reports through text messages.  I told my friend Al who was in on the text chat to meet me at my house, and we would drive down to see the bird, a black guillemot.  This was not a life bird for either of us, but still a rare bird to see from land in New Jersey.

I have a mobile sport fishing permit that allows me to drive on the beach at Island Beach State Park.  Barnegat Inlet is at the southern end of Island Beach, separating it from Barnegat Light State Park.  From the end of the paved road at Island Beach, there is about a mile and a half stretch of beach to the inlet.  Not a bad walk (on a nice day), but obviously much quicker in my vehicle.  It was a nice day, and it was a weekend and there were a lot of bait fish in the ocean attracting big striped bass, so there were many fishermen and their vehicles on the beach.  At the inlet, more fishermen were fishing for tautog, or blackfish, from the jetty.  Our friends Doug and Chelsea met us there and the four of us were the only people at the jetty with binoculars instead of fishing rods, looking for a duck-sized bird in the wide inlet instead of fish.  The inlet was rather calm with no swells or chop to complicate looking for the bird, but there was constant boat traffic in and out of the inlet.  Almost all of the boats were traveling on the north side of the inlet, which is where we were, and probably why the bird was found on the south side. 

We walked along the jetty, scanning the inlet with binoculars and spotting scopes and the only bird we could find on the water was a lone long-tailed duck, the first one of the fall season.  After a while, we resorted to Zirlin’s Laws of Birding, and #4 states: “Don’t look for the bird, look for the birders.”  (These five birding laws are not published anywhere but are observations from the mind of another birding friend, Larry).  We scanned the jetty across the inlet and spotted a couple birders with scopes and cameras pointed at something.  Trying to triangulate my point with the possible point on the water that they were looking at, I finally found the bird, across the way, with my binoculars.  Doug and Chelsea were able to get their scopes on it too and the four of us had decent looks at the bird.  It was too far to get photos, but as I mentioned earlier it wasn’t a life bird for any of us, just a great rarity to see.
Black guillemot, January 14, 2020.  © S. Weiss
This bird lingered in the Barnegat Inlet from January 6, 2020 to January 15, 2020.  Black guillemots breed in the arctic and upper North Atlantic.  They rarely venture south of New England outside of breeding season.

A quick look at available records that I could find, makes this likely the earliest sighting of a black guillemot for New Jersey, and among the earliest sightings of any alcid from land in New Jersey.  My previous, and only other sighting of a black guillemot was of one very cooperative bird also at Barnegat Inlet in January of 2020.  That bird lingered for over a week for many observers to see.  This bird gave me the two guillemots one can see in the United States for the year:  the black guillemot on the Atlantic side, and the pigeon guillemot on the Pacific side.
Left, black guillemot.  Right, pigeon guillemot, September 26, 2023, Westport, WA.  © S. Weiss
Though the photo of the pigeon guillemot is not great, both birds are very similar in appearance, size and habitat.  Besides their geographic ranges, the two species can be separated by their underwings.  The black guillemots mostly white underwings can be seen in the photograph.  The underwings of the pigeon guillemot are all black.




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