Birds and Other Nature Sightings

      A week after a 12-hour pelagic out of Cape May, my friend Jason and I took the seven-plus hour drive to North Carolina’s Outer Banks for a one day pelagic.  The company there is a leader of east coast pelagics, attracting participants from around the world.  Captain Brian normally operates his Stormy Petrel II vessel out of Hatteras during the spring and summer.  This trip ran out of Oregon Inlet in Nags Head, shortening our commute by better than an hour each way.  The drive took us through iconic Outer Banks towns like Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills.  Many think of Kitty Hawk as the place where Orville and Wilbur Wright made aviation history with the first flight, but that actually occurred in neighboring Kill Devil Hills.  My first thoughts of the latter location are where the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore brought live updates of approaching hurricanes. The Wright Brothers National Memorial, N. Croatan Highway in Kill Devil Hills...

     On Sunday, I left home at 4:30 in the morning for Cape May to join a 12-hour pelagic trip aboard the American Star.  It was cold, about 35 degrees, but for mid-February in New Jersey that is not bad.  I go out on pelagics whenever I can because there are birds and other sea life out on the ocean that you just cannot find on land.  My previous pelagic trip last month was windy, colder with snow flurries.  Weather conditions this time were better, and my expectations were a little high.  This winter has been exceptional for alcids along the northeastern Atlantic, from New York to North Carolina.  I knew leaving home that this was an opportunity to see maybe five different alcids:   razorbill , dovekie , Atlantic puffin , common and thick-billed murres .  For the day, we scored four of the five; only missing a thick-billed murre.  The tally for the day was 282 razorbills, 55 dovekies, one puffin and one common murre, plus s...

     I spent today like I often do, driving along the beach at Island Beach State Park.  I am intrigued with the amount of alcids in our area and I want to see them as much as I can.  Any day they could just pick up and move out of sight.  It might be years before such incredible numbers occur again.  Today I counted 136 razorbills.  Much of the time all I needed to do was find a loose flock of Bonaparte’s gulls fluttering over the water.  Soon enough, a razorbill, or several of them, would pop up and the gulls would try to get some of the food that the submariner brought to the surface. Flotillas of razorbills off the beach.   © S. Weiss Along the way I also found 18 dovekies on the water.  Dovekies are rare here from shore.  In past years, it was a lucky birder to get one.  Needless to say, this is a personal high count.  Unfortunately, two of the 18 did not survive the day.  I watched one of these tiny bi...

     The past two days birding were very productive for winter sea birds.  On Monday I joined a group of birders on an inshore pelagic trip as part of the Barnegat (NJ) Christmas Bird Count.  We spent about ten hours on a boat patrolling the ocean boundaries of the area covered by the Bird Count in Ocean County, from Barnegat Inlet to the southern end of Holgate.  On Tuesday I spent about four hours at the opposite end of the county, at Manasquan Inlet standing on the jetty on the Point Pleasant side.  Both days were mostly highlighted by alcids - Razorbills  and Dovekies , and small gulls - Bonaparte’s and Little . The front end of a line of razorbills during morning flight.   © S. Weiss For the previous week or so, razorbills had been reported in huge numbers along the New Jersey coast from Sandy Hook to Cape May.  Observers reported hundreds of birds passing each day.  The birds didn’t disappoint us on Monday either.  ...