Island Beach SP Pomarine Jaeger 11/25/24

     After seeing my first cave swallows last weekend in Point Pleasant, I went to Island Beach State Park hoping to find one there.  I actually have been keeping an eye out for cave swallows at the park all month.  That would be a new patch bird for me, and I was anticipating that the recent influx of cave swallows along the eastern seaboard would give me the best chance of spotting one.  I figured the bathing beach area would be the best spot to look.  There are open beach, dunes and large pavilions.  Plenty of areas for swallows to forage and roost.  I met my friend Alex on the beach.  We scanned the area for a while with no luck.  There were no alerts coming in from any of the locations that had been reporting them from Rhode Island to Delaware.  No cave swallows.

We turned to sea watching since the only real activity was on the water.  The fishermen were up and down the beach chancing the striped bass that were feeding on the schools of menhaden, or what we locally call bunker.  Also exploiting the striped bass feeding forays were the birds.  All the local gulls were swarming overhead trying to pick up scraps of baitfish.  There were plenty of laughing gulls, ring-billed gulls, American herring gulls and some great black-backed gulls.  Some northern gannets, common and red-throated loons and a few Forster's terns took part in the buffet.  The birds were a mix of ages and plumages.  White-winged scoters and long-tailed ducks hustled about to stay out of harm's way.  

While I was scanning the ocean, one dark bird flying low over the water immediately caught my eye.  I got Alex's attention by blurting, "I got a jaeger here!"  He got on the bird, and we watched it abruptly turn almost 180 degrees and chase down a ring-billed gull.  It chased the smaller bird briefly to dislodge it from the food scrap the latter was carrying but gave up on it and flew off.  Once I initially saw the jaeger I switched over to my camera and fired off many shots as it maneuvered after the gull and flew off.  Our initial thought was parasitic jaeger, the default jaeger seen from land around here.  After the bird disappeared, I looked through my photos to see if any of them came out decent.  Almost half were not in focus, but more than half were okay.  As I reviewed the decent photos, I began rethinking parasitic jaeger and thought to myself that this just might actually be a pomarine jaeger.  I tried to show Alex a shot of the bird to explain my thought process, but between the sun glare and his lack of reading glasses, he couldn't make out the photos.  I mentioned that the bird had a robust chest and overall was bigger than the gull.
Juvenile pomarine jaeger, IBSP, 11/25/2024.  © S. Weiss
This bird's bulky size, deep chest and prominent white in its primaries and primary coverts (double flash) separate it from parasitic jaeger.  It is much larger than the ring-billed gull it briefly chased.  A parasitic jaeger would have been slightly smaller to about same size as the gull and would have relentlessly pursued it.

Later in the day I downloaded my photos so I could crop them and see what we had observed.  Field marks for pomarine jaeger were apparent, including the prominent double white flashes in its wings that I did not notice while I was looking through the camera.  I sent a couple of photos to another friend who is much more adept at seabird identification.  He confirmed what I thought.  I let Alex know too.  This was my first pomarine jaeger from shore and my first for Island Beach.  I wound up with a new patch bird.  Not the one I went looking for but a difficult one, nonetheless.  Ironically, two days later another friend found a young pomarine jaeger sitting on the beach across the inlet at Barnegat Light State Park.  It is likely the same bird Alex and I saw, and it never really disappeared.  It has now spent nearly a week in the area for many people to see.

It's not every day that you find a new or rare bird, but it certainly makes it worth trying every day.

White-winged scoters.  © S. Weiss




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