Birds and Other Nature Sightings

     My wife and I took my daughter for a long weekend to Disney as part of her 30th birthday celebration.  She has never outgrown the Disney experience since her first trip when she was four years old.  I don’t mind the trip there either.  I like the resort we stay at, and Florida is always good for birding and other nature sightings.  As a matter of fact, I could produce a nice list of wildlife sightings over the years for Disney property alone.  The only problem for this trip was that it was hot.  We knew at the beginning of the booking process that it would be hot in central Florida in June, but this time it was oppressive.  We dealt with it because it just happened to be equally as hot back at home too.   I did incidental birding for three of the four days while I was with the family.  I had one day to myself, and that is when I ventured over to nearby Lake Apopka Wildlife Drive.  Over the four days I did not pick up ...

     I got to spend Father’s Day tuna fishing on my friend’s boat.  I like tuna trips because they combine two of my favorite activities, fishing and pelagic birding.  Usually, to get these sleek, powerful fish we have to get out to one of the canyon fishing grounds and start before daybreak.  At the shelf where the ocean floor drops from a couple hundred feet to a couple thousand feet deep, the water temperature also rises.  That is where many pelagic game fish gather, as well as birds and other sea life.  We spent most of the day trolling for tuna.  We scored two yellowfin tuna, and saw a good sample of marine life. The bird life was slower than I expected.  The morning hours produced only Wilson’s storm-petrels and some great shearwaters .  I really was hoping to spot Leach’s or band-rumped storm-petrels , jaegers or even a black-capped petrel , but none were around.  Chumming might have helped bring in some of those bird...

     My fishing captain friend invited me out for his second day of a sea bass tournament on Sunday.  It was my first opportunity of the year to get out on the water, catch some fish and see some sea birds.  It turned out to be a good day for fishing for all of us on board and a good first day of sea birding for me.  We left the dock at five a.m. and headed out of Barnegat Inlet.  We had fog all day, ranging from thick to about a mile of visibility, but the seas were calm.  We made it to the first fishing spot around six a.m. and the fishing started out with a bang.  It would slow as the day progressed and as we hopped around to other spots.  We happily had our limit of sea bass and added some ling , or red hake , to our bounty.   Birds were scarce for most of the day, maybe because of the fog conditions, or maybe because we were not chumming.  Early on though we had some Wilson’s storm-petrels flying around, making their skip...

     The past couple of years I have been fortunate to see North Atlantic right whales on pelagic bird and mammal trips out of Cape May with the Cape May Whale and Research Center .  North Atlantic right whales are one of the world’s most endangered species with a population of less than 350 individuals, and  only about 20 percent of those are calving females.  I have been lucky enough to see right whales on three occasions, including a mother and calf.  The other day I submitted photos from two of those sightings to the North Atlantic Right Whale Catalog at  http://rwcatalog.neaq.org .  The next day I received an email from the staff thanking me for my photos and shared information on my whales. The catalog is maintained by the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life on behalf of the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium .  I submitted photos of a female whale and her calf spotted off of Cape May on March, 2021 and an individual whale se...

     Monday morning, I made my first survey of my yard and right away noticed several new bird arrivals for the year:   Baltimore orioles , common yellowthroat , black-throated green warblers and a singing blue-winged warbler were moving through the trees gleaning insects from the foliage.  I had a very early northern parula back in March, but now there were a few and they were singing.  The first migration push for our area had finally arrived.  I wound up tallying 45 bird species in the yard for the day, 46 actually when I heard the continuing Eastern screech-owl early in the evening.  However, I spent the bulk of my day picking up new arrivals at Island Beach State Park. The state park is a known migratory hotspot.  I spent about five hours walking most of the bayside trails.  I tallied 82 species for the day.  That total included 14 new year birds, and two of those birds were new personal patch birds.  The two bird...