Birds and Other Nature Sightings

 After a week's absence, I took a drive to one of my favorite places at the Jersey Shore, Island Beach State Park.  I spent Sunday, Father’s Day, with family.  Late in the day I saw that a couple of white ibis were reported there in the morning, and in the afternoon my friend, Chris, texted that he had seen and photographed a Manx shearwater off the end of the Barnegat Inlet jetty.  Both species, from where they were reported, are rare.  White ibis sightings in New Jersey are becoming more and more frequent and, as such, they had been removed from the NJ Bird Records Committee’s list of reviewable birds.  The Manx shearwater is a pelagic species, not uncommon in NJ waters, but rare and reviewable when seen from land.  This small shearwater could easily be missed by many birders, but Chris is an experienced pelagic birder and is very familiar with them.  It was too late in the afternoon when I saw the reports, so I decided to wait until morning to ...

     Last July, my wife and I took a mini vacation with my friend, Al, and his wife to West Palm Beach, FL.  It was just a couple of days so my wife could get away and relax.  Of course, I used the opportunity to get in some birding.  As I usually do, I spent the weeks leading up to departure by studying eBird reports of the area.  I assembled a reasonable target list of birds considering that I wasn’t going to have any actual dedicated time just for birding.  Plus, Al likes to bird too, so if I could get him a new bird or two, he’d be happy. We stayed in West Palm Beach.  That area of Florida was new to me.  Sometimes I forget just how big Florida is until I start driving around looking for birding hotspots.  It is common to have to drive well over an hour within any county to find a desired location.  On the first full day I did find a spot that was only about a 15-to-20-minute drive from our hotel called Winding Waters Natur...

      Since this blog is new, I will occasionally look back at previous adventures and share some of those highlights here.  My first flashback is from August 2021 that featured a new life bird and an interesting wildlife encounter.   My wife, oldest daughter and I went to Florida to visit family in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, during which we took a side trip to Disney World for a couple of days.  One of those days, my wife and daughter set out for a magical day at one of the theme parks while I took the car to Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive.  Wildlife drive is a central Florida hotspot about 25 miles from Disney that hosts nearly 300 known bird species.  It is basically a nine-plus mile drive through central Florida marshes and wetlands.  I had two targeted birds I wanted to find there that I likely wasn’t going to see in New Jersey:  fulvous whistling-duck and purple gallinule.  The only purple gallinule I had seen was the pre...

      Today my wife and I took a drive along the beach at Island Beach State Park in New Jersey.  I drove to the end of the park's road and entered the beach as only allowed by four-wheel drive vehicles with sport fishing permits.  There was a mild south to southeasterly wind, and I was hoping to find some shearwaters or storm-petrels close to shore.  I drove to the terminus of the park at the north side of Barnegat Inlet.   For a while I scanned the ocean on both sides of the inlet, but there were no pelagic birds that I could see.  There were no new migrants, just many of the expected locals.  An eBird list for the spot was filled with the usuals:  great black-backed, herring and laughing gulls; common terns, osprey, double-crested cormorants, American oystercatchers, black-bellied plovers, sanderlings, ruddy turnstones and semipalmated plovers and sandpipers.  I took a slow drive north up the beach, occasionally sc...

       Yesterday I decided to leave the comforts of my local environs to look for a few birds that are rare to New Jersey.  The most opportune place to go to do this is Cape May.  Even though New Jersey is a small state, the drive from home in Ocean County to Cape May is still about 90 miles.  So, taking the drive needed to be calculated, meaning I would go when the chances were better for finding a new state bird.  The other day a magnificent frigatebird had been soaring over Cape May and a gray kingbird recently appeared.  When I saw that the kingbird was seen again in the morning, I decided to take the trip south.  No frigatebird was yet reported, but you never know what might show up in Cape May at this time of year.  Maybe a swallow-tailed kite, a white-winged dove or an anhinga might make an appearance while I'm there.   When I got to Cape May, the reports were that the kingbird was still around.  I drove to the...

    This past weekend, Jason, Chris and I returned for our second pelagic birding trip with Seabirding pelagics in Hatteras, NC.  We booked ourselves on the first four days of their 12-day spring blitz, May 20 through May 23.  Last year, my first experience there, we set the bar high with phenomenal birding.  This year, well, our hopes were high, but tempered.  The Stormy Petrel II sailed all four days, and it was a slog getting out to the Gulf Stream and back.  The only dry side of the boat at times was inside the cabin.  For most of the four days we were stuck in a west or southwesterly wind pattern, which is not ideal for offshore birding.  While I personally did not see any new life birds, the trip did provide us with some good views of pelagic birds that one can't see from shore. The highlight birds of the four days were Leach's, band-rumped and Wilson's storm-petrels; one arctic tern; Cory's, Audubon's and two single sooty shearwaters; ...