Down the Shore on a Stakeout

When a bird is in an area where you don't expect it, it is considered an "accidental." If it hangs around an area long enough for birders to come from far and wide to see it, it is an "event."

But if it hangs around and only comes out into the open for very short periods during the day, and there are lots of people who still want to see it, that becomes a "stakeout."

Here is the difference between an event and a stakeout. Years ago I learned several northern lapwings, a bird usually found in Europe and Asia, showed up at a farm in New Egypt, New Jersey. These birds caused quite a stir. In their usual territory they like mudflats, open country and, notably, farm land. Based on what I read on the eBird lists, quite a lot of people came to the south Jersey farm to see these birds and had to be reminded to stay in the road and not to block the farm equipment.

Cormorant watching over the oyster reefs in Barnegat Bay
 (the lighthouse can be seen on the far right.)
(Margo D. Beller)

Also in New Egypt is a used bookstore my husband (MH) likes to visit, so it was not very hard to get him to agree to drive down there a few weeks after these birds had been reported. Amazingly, the three birds were still around and there were no people other than another couple and us. We saw, we noted, we left.

That was an event.

Meanwhile, in 2019 I was underemployed. I had a lot of time to go chasing after rarities, especially if they were close to home. So it was that a black-headed grosbeak, a western relative of the more common (to me) rose-breasted grosbeak, was coming to a feeder in the backyard of a house not far from Jockey Hollow in Morristown. The homeowners were nice enough to allow people to come to their driveway and watch for the bird at their feeder.

Sign explaining the Forked River Beach project (RE Berg-Andersson)

In hindsight, I should've brought a chair because this bird was nowhere to be seen, at first. A man who drove with his wife to NJ from Ohio, as I recall, was nice enough to let me sit in his chair. They'd been there for hours by the time I arrived. We were soon joined by others in chairs or standing behind tripods holding their long-lensed cameras, ready to "shoot" this rarity.

I was lucky. Besides the man letting me sit it was only 30 minutes in that I saw the bird, pointed it out and the cameras started clicking. The bird allowed me to see its handsome black head and orange breast (it was a male) and then I gave the man his chair, thanked him and left.

That was a stakeout.

This is a longwinded introduction to the second stakeout I've ever attended, this one with MH the other week down the New Jersey shore.

Green heron (RE Berg-Andersson)

I don't know if it was the weather pattern or global warming but recently there have been many roseate spoonbills found far from their usual breeding territory in the Florida Everglades and along the Gulf of Mexico. The bird, as the name implies, is pink and has a spoon-like bill to scoop up its meal. MH and I have seen one twice - a mature captive bird at Pittsburgh's National Aviary and a juvenile that in 2018 was found by the side of a rain-created pond at a quarry in northwestern New Jersey. More recently these birds have been found in Maine, Connecticut and Minnesota.

Three juveniles were found in Forked River Beach, NJ, earlier this month and that prompted a stakeout. Incredibly, MH was into the idea of traveling to a shore area in summer (on a weekday) to see these birds.

Semipalmated plover (RE Berg-Andersson)

It is a long drive from our town to Forked River Beach, especially taking the back roads MH prefers to drive rather than superhighways (me, too) and making pit stops. Once we got to the area we parked near a playground by Barnegat Bay. We could see the lighthouse across the water. In front of us were poles atop which were double-crested cormorants standing guard over oyster reefs.

If the insatiable desire for eating oysters at fashionable New York restaurants, as detailed by Mark Kurlansky in his book "The Big Oyster", didn't kill off the area's oysters, water pollution did. According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, oysters are a "keystone" species "meaning they are an integral part of a healthy marine ecosystem. Oyster reefs provide vital habitat for many of the commercial and recreational species that fishermen, boaters, and naturalists enjoy in New Jersey’s waters. Oyster reefs are home to a host of species including striped bass, blue crab, and summer flounder, among many others. Additionally, a single adult oyster can filter and clear significant volumes of water each day, helping to improve water quality by cycling excess nutrients."

At the same time the oysters were being depleted, coastlines were being eroded by the constant wave action intensified whenever a major storm or hurricane occurred. And we've had some major hurricanes affecting the shoreline in recent years. Beaches are big business in New Jersey. The Forked River Beach beds were an effort to help the shoreline in this area.

Great egret, as seen from behind the stakeout. The
roseate spoonbills would later be seen in this
area. (RE Berg-Andersson)

There was a paved path to walk past beach houses large and small with lovely gardens. There were benches, monarch butterflies at the flowers and even some birds but no spoonbills and, tellingly, no people looking for them. We were in the wrong place.

Luckily, someone had put a map on Facebook and by comparing that map to our map we found our way to another part of Forked River Beach. This time we found the stakeout. This time we had our chairs and sat a while. MH took pictures as I scanned the mudflats with my binoculars.

There were green herons. There were semipalmated sandpipers and semipalmated plovers. There were Forster's terns and a great egret. There were laughing gulls and herring gulls and very nice people who pointed out birds as they found them.

Sometimes it is a good thing to have a spotting scope, but I don't have one.
As best as I can tell the birds in this picture include semipalmated sandpiper (the 
small one), Forster's tern (the smaller blackheaded one), laughing gull (the larger
blackheaded one) and immature herring gull (the dark one in the back). I
can't identify the others. I've always been weak on shorebird IDs.
(RE Berg-Andersson)

What there weren't were roseate spoonbills.

That these birds were here at all was an amazing thing. This wetland along the bay was across the street from a massive development of expensive houses, many of which faced or were within walking distance of the water. (Hurricane Sandy's devastation of the Jersey shore in 2012 has not stopped housing development. If anything, it has gotten worse.) The main streets were named for Florida areas. Cross streets were named for birds. (As it happened, the closest cross street to the stakeout was Spoonbill Court.) Thankfully, this wetland had been left alone. 

We did not stay more than a half-hour. Seeing these birds would've been nice but they weren't my main reason for us to come here. It was very pleasant to get out of the house, sit by water on a sunny summer day, get a breeze in my face and look for birds. We left to explore areas nearby and eventually started the long trip back. As I later learned, the spoonbills briefly showed themselves about 30 minutes afterwards. The air must've been loud with camera clicks.

As of Aug. 15, they are still around, according to a Facebook post from the area.

Global warming has pushed many birds north. There was a time someone from New Jersey would be lucky to find a Carolina wren, a redbellied woodpecker or a northern cardinal. Now they are common. White ibis, another Everglades bird, has been coming to Ocean City, NJ, for years to breed and now white ibis are being seen in other northeastern areas. Mississippi kites have bred in New Hampshire for years.

There was a time you'd never see a Carolina wren in the north, especially
in winter. But that has changed. (Margo D. Beller)

I expect the ibises and the spoonbills to head south when winter comes. But what if winters remain so warm there is no cold and no snow to prompt them to leave? I would say there would be no migration but there would be a lot of competition for limited resources between birds that should've migrated south and those that remain all year or are only found in winter.

For the moment, the New Jersey spoonbills are an accidental that created an event that became a stakeout. But they could be a harbinger of things to come. 

Down the Shore

Thou little bird, thou dweller by the sea, Why takest thou its melancholy voice, And with that boding cry Along the waves dost thou fly? Oh! rather, bird, with me Through this fair land rejoice!
-- Richard Henry Dana

As I write, in June, the backyard is very quiet these warm, humid mornings. The house wren box next door I can see from my chair is active, with both parents shuttling back and forth to feed their young. In my longish grass that MH won't shave to the nub as our neighbors' lawn services do, there are chipping sparrows and their begging young. At the box in my apple tree, the house wren sings softly and then enters the box with food. This nest is a week or so behind the other one, so the young are still small enough for the parent to enter. Soon, the chicks will be much bigger and noisier when the parent arrives to feed them.

Skimmer (left) and laughing gull (RE Berg-Andersson)

The singing birds I heard just a month ago are either nesting and keeping quiet to protect young, or they have moved on from my area to their breeding territories farther north. If you want to find any birds during the summer, you have to get out early when the birds are most active. It will also help you to avoid the heat.

It is at this time of year I look at the various bird lists and see more reports coming from what we in New Jersey call "down the shore." This can mean the beaches from Sandy Hook to Island Beach State Park to Long Beach Island down to Cape May, or it can mean the Delaware Bay side of New Jersey, or it can mean river inlets in between. Where there's water, there are likely a lot of birds in summer.

It is times like this I miss Plumb Beach, a short walk from where I grew up. At that time it was a dump but now it and the rest of the Brooklyn shoreline is prime birding habitat and lots cooler than where I live now.

Unlike Plumb Beach or the rest of the southern Brooklyn, southern Queens and eastern Staten Island shoreline (which make up most of the Gateway National Recreational Area), in New Jersey it costs money to go to the shore and look for birds along the beaches. You need to pay for parking and/or a beach pass. The shore gets pretty crowded in summer, as you'd expect. Even at Sandy Hook, which is also part of Gateway, you have to get there very early to tell the guard you are a birder so you do not get charged for beach parking. But I don't go to Sandy Hook in summer. I can't get down there that early and I don't want the crowd and the traffic.

Redwing blackbird, Bombay Hook (RE Berg-Andersson)

When I go birding in beach areas it is to places where you only go to go birding. In New Jersey, that place is the Brigantine National Wildlife Refuge, not far from Atlantic City, where you pay your fee and can drive along the dikes, stopping if you see a bird or other creature that interests you. (There are also trails in some areas if you prefer hiking and land birds.)

In the hottest days of summer you can find yourself in slow traffic, just like the highway you took to get down here, and you have to be careful not to ram another car as you scan the impoundments. Besides other cars stopping suddenly, you have to deal with other hazards such as green bottle flies that will hit your eyes and enter your mouth or your car if either is open too far or for too long, more common house flies, ticks and mosquitoes.

But there are the birds, sometimes thousands of shorebirds.

Great egret, Bombay Hook (RE Berg-Andersson)

I am not the best person to ask about shorebirds. I can identify the ones I know best including various herons, egrets, the sanderlings that run down to the water line as the ocean waves pull back only to rush away when the waves come in, more distinctive shorebirds including skimmers, ruddy turnstones and willets. But don't ask me if I am seeing a western sandpiper, a semipalmated sandpiper or a least sandpiper in that large flock flying quickly away. I will have to check my guidebook really, really hard, and even then I won't be completely sure.

There are other birds, however. In Delaware there is a similar place to Brigantine where you can drive on the dikes and slowly scan the impoundments for waterfowl, Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. MH and I have been here in November when there have been thousands of snow geese but it is rare we come down in summer. As it happens, we were there in early June. The thousands of shorebirds reported Memorial Day weekend were gone except for three distinctive shorebirds called avocets.

However, we had many bald eagles, osprey, indigo buntings, herons, egrets and two birds I rarely if ever see. One is the clapper rail, the other the marsh wren.

The clapper lives its life in secret, within the thick vegetation of salt marshes. I have only heard one once, in one of the murky areas of one of my favorite New Jersey birding sites, the Great Swamp, where clappers and other chicken-like marsh birds such as the sora and the Virginia rail have been known to show up in summer, when the vegetation fills the watery areas. In Delaware, however, it was on the sand in front of the vegetation. I was so startled to see it I thought at first it was the sora, which does not hide itself much. Reason soon returned - soras are darker and smaller - and I realized what it was.

Clapper rail, Bombay Hook (RE Berg-Andersson)

The marsh wren, meanwhile, I would expect in an area with reeds and other vegetation. In fact, if you hear or see one marsh wren it is likely you are going to hear many more because they continually call to remind each other that this is THEIR territory. If you are lucky, one of these feisty little guys, whose song is thinner and faster than its cousin the house wren, will pop up, clutch a reed in each foot and sing for a long time. Listen carefully and you'll hear more wrens singing as you drive along the road.

Back to Brigantine: For the hardcore New Jersey birder, this is where you go, no matter how far away you live. But when I wake in the mornings nowadays, sitting on my porch before it gets too hot and humid and listening to what few birds are around is enough, even if in my mind I'm scanning the beach shore with my binoculars from the comfort of my folding chair in the sand, no one except MH around.

Soon enough it will cool again, nesting will be over and the birds will be on the move southward. 

Marsh wren, 2017, Bombay Hook (RE Berg-Andersson)

Birding Without Trying

I admit it, I am getting to the age where I have stopped caring about a lot of things. For the purpose of this post I will restrict those things to birding.

There was a point when I didn't think twice - ok, maybe I thought once or twice - about getting up before dawn, eating just enough to keep the stomach growling down and then taking my gear and myself out to one of my favorite spots to look for migrant birds. Usually this was in the spring when the gaily colored warblers and others would be flitting around in trees starting to bud or leaf out and singing territorial songs that would make them a bit easier to find.

In autumn, when the birds are in duller colors and flying south, my bird watching would be less in the forests than at a hawk platform, where you don't have to get up as early and, if you are lucky, you can get to a good spot with a minimum of hard climbing.

Atop rocky Hawk Mtn. (RE Berg-Andersson)

This autumn was the first when I did not have a great desire to go to Pennsylvania's Hawk Mountain, one of the best places in the east to watch migrating raptors, but one of the harder places to climb to the top. Our first time there was magical - warblers in the forests lower in elevation, almost no crowds for a long time once we joined the counters at the top of the North lookout. Even the trip down the mountain allowed us to find a new bird for us, a Bicknell's thrush.

The second time, a few years later, was harder. No birds of note in the woods on the way up or down, but even if there were the rocky path was treacherous, and I nearly fell several times. I fear falling. People my age who fall break bones and mentally go into a tailspin, as my vibrant 90+ year old friend did after falling and breaking his ankle.

So this year I've restricted my hawk watching to New Jersey's Scott's Mountain, where one drives to the top of the mountain, pulls out her lawn chair and sits with a convivial group of people who have a fine view to the north.

I've also had no desire to rise early and go to the woods. My wood walking has been in the afternoons. Sometimes you get lucky late in the day and the birds are flying about trying to get a last meal before dark, when they will either bed down or take off to the south.

Still, for me to not go outside on the weekend after a week indoors working is anathema. So this past Saturday, MH and I went down the Jersey Shore.

We specifically timed the trip to avoid the "season," when the traffic is horrendous on the highways and on the beach. Unlike a lot of coastal areas in other states, almost all of New Jersey's beaches are regulated to make the towns money, and you can't sit on a beach and look at the water unless you pay for a beach pass, or are staying in a motel. That doesn't include the cost of parking.

We also specifically looked for an area not made famous, or infamous, by Snooki and her cohorts.

There was one more requirement: It had to be close enough to an area where we could do some birding later in the day or if we got restless. But our primary purpose was to sit on the beach and just relax for at least as many hours as it took to drive down.

My chair awaits. Strathmere beach, Sept. 21, 2014 (Margo D. Beller)

It has been a long time since MH and I just sat on a beach -- it was the year after we got married, when we stayed on Cape Cod and discovered the hard way the lotion we'd brought was old and useless. We've sat for short periods on town benches looking at beaches - Mexico Beach on the Florida panhandle comes immediately to mind, as do many areas along the coast of North Carolina - but not in NJ. We either bird or avoid.

I won't keep you in suspense any longer - we found that place in the northern part of Cape May County, about 20 miles from Cape May itself and all its birding temptations. The town is Strathmere, the beach requires no pass and the parking is free. The town is just north of the busier Sea Isle City, which that day was having a huge Irish heritage festival (who knew?), the kind of noisy, booze-fueled thing shore towns throw to draw visitors and just what we wanted to avoid.

We sat on the beach for over three hours. While the rest of the area beyond the dunes was warming to the upper 70s, we sat with a strong wind in our faces and clouds overhead keeping us cool enough where a fleece jacket was not out of place.

We were nearly alone. We had parked along the road, near the temporary toilet - another consideration for when I go birding now - and walked on the stairs up and over the dune to sit just at the high tide line. We had just passed the low tide point and ahead of us was a large flock of sanderlings running to and from the surf, feeding. I put my binoculars in my lap and every so often would pick them up to look at these shorebirds. At one point I looked more closely and realized there were other, smaller birds mixed in with them - semipalmated plovers, semipalmated sandpipers and one least sandpiper.There may have been others but, as I said, I wasn't there to look for birds.

Around us flew herring and Franklin gulls, several types of terns and two ospreys hovering over the same area as human surfcasters and for the same reason - fishing for supper.
 
After leaving for a late lunch we drove down to Stone Harbor's Wetlands Institute and found tricolored and little blue herons, black-crowned night-herons, great and snowy egrets and a variety of shorebirds in the impoundments. We were looking for birds and were not disappointed.

But sitting on the beach was for me. The birds came without my seeking them. I had a day of few people and the aggravations they cause (aside from having to drive on New Jersey's notorious highways for a few hours each way), with little noise aside from the roar of the wind and surf in my ears.

Is this anti-social behavior a good thing? Maybe not. But for one day I got as close to heaven as I am likely to get while maintaining a pulse.