Triskaidekaphobia

Triskaidekaphobia-the fear of the number 13

On Friday, August 13th (8/13), at 8:13, 13 birders set out from the North River Audubon in Marshfield, MA, for a morning of birding. Superstious anyone?

Our first stop was Third cliff beach in Scituate. Shorebirds numbers were low, hightlighted by a White-rumped Sandpiper and a few Piping Plovers. Other good birds were a pair of Bonaparte's Gulls, a gannet, 2 coopers hawks, and a peregrine.

Even better was the next stop, Scituate reservoir. There we found a Stilt Sandpiper and a Pectoral Sandpiper in the same field of view, with a snipe and a few more white rumps nearby.

I finished the morning with 63 species, 3 year birds, and 3 state birds. Who says Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky?

Shorebirding at Jamaica Bay

http://www.kiwifoto.com/images/galleryphotos/american_avocet/american_avocet_7C2V1555.jpg

Over most of August, I had been planning to go to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, in NYC. The east pond there is one of the best spots to see migrating shorebird in the northeast. Rarities are expected every year. The shorebird section of my life list was a bit thin, so I figured that I could get 4-6 lifers in one trip.

Unfortunately, actually getting that one trip was tricky. I opted out of a NYS young birders' club trip there in favor of a weekend at the beach. A missed text message would have given me another opportunity. August ended without a JBWR trip. Still, I wanted to go. So finally, on September 13 (2 months ago by now), I got there. I'm glad I did.

The first stop was halfway up the east pond. There, I saw Parulas, yellowlegs, shovelers, and teal. On the way back, I found a northern waterthrush, peregrine falcon, and palm warblers.

A drive and then walk, which was somewhat lengthened by a wrong turn, brought me to the northern shore of the east pond. There, I saw why everyone I talked to said to bring boots. I was glad I had listened to them. The mud there is deep, sticky, and muddy.

One of my target birds was the pair of american avocets, which are unusual on the east coast but had been seen there recently. They were a few steps down from the start of the trail in the middle of the "pond"(really a area of wet mud), in a group of canada geese. Awesome. Lifer #1.

I continued down along the pond, spotting lesser yellowlegs and least sandpipers, and navigating the trecherous cove, the muddiest part of the trail. Soon after that, I found a pair of birds that I realized were stilt sandpipers, another target and lifer #2. A single little blue heron was also present, along with some forster's terns.

I reached another birder with a scope, and he helpfully pointed out my life pectoral sandpiper. A red knot in the same flock of birds was also a lifer. I missed the long-billed dowitcher that was in the same flock when a merlin spooked all the birds. After a couple more minutes, I had to leave. It had been just 30 minutes that I was on the east pond, and I saw 4 life birds. This really shows how great Jamaica Bay is for shorebirds.

And maybe next year i'll go in August.

Eamon Corbett

Supurb Summer for Birding- Part 1- 3 at 3rd Cliff

From http://www.capebretonbirds.ca

First off: I am way way behind on these posts, so I am going to have a few from the summer, and then one from recently, and then I will be caught up.

On July 31 I joined Mass Audubon's weekly Friday Morning Birders bird walk, where we take a van to various birding spots on the south shore (massaudubonblogs.typepad.com/southshorejournal). I have gone 7 times by now, and gotten a life bird on 6 of them. This time, we went to Scituate, just north of where the trip meets, in Marshfield. Our first stop was 3rd cliff, a beach that is at the mouth of two rivers, right where they join the ocean. The ocean side was reletively empty, but the river mouth had shorebirds. There were a few points of land that had just been exposed to the tide. The first was sand, and we picked out turnstones, semipalmated and black-bellied plovers, terns, gulls, and many sanderlings and semipalmated sandpipers. One bird looked different- smaller than the gulls and larger than the sandpipers. Its bill was hidden, but after we got closer it began preening, and the long, decurved bill of a Whimbrel was obvious. Life bird!

The next spit was covered in small rocks. It turns out only some of them were actually rocks. There were hundreds of Semipalmated Sandpipers covering the whole area. It was amazing, because you could hardly tell there were any until you looked closely. By this time, we were nearing the Piping Plover and Least Tern nesting sites on the beach, and we spotted adults and chicks of both species. Taking another look at the shorebirds, one of the leaders found a black tern, my second lifer of the day. 15 minutes later, when we tried to relocate it, we discovered that there were actually 2 black terns.

Some other good birds included a Savannah Sparrow, Horned Lark, and a flock of 6 whimbrels that I spotted.

The next spot was a muddy parking lot at a public beach. In the puddle, there were semi plovers, semi sandpipers, and my first White-rumped Sandpipers!

The last stop was a lighthouse, where we scanned the sea to find a handful of moving black specks- Wilson's Storm-petrels.

All in all, a very good morning of birding, with 3 lifers, a few more cool birds, and 13 shorebirds (20 if you count gulls and terns)

Eamon Corbett

Surprise Skimmers at Plymouth Beach

With the number of terns I had seen from the whale watch and the posibility of arctic or roseate terns, I could not resist a visit to Plymouth Beach. There is a huge tern colony at the tip of Plymouth Beach, with hundred or thousands of common terns, plus a handful of roseates. The latter 2 were my targets.

Plymouth Beach is also known as Plymouth Long Beach, and with good reason. The walk to the tern colony was almost three miles, some of it in soft sand. On the way I found mixed shorebirds, including dowitchers and willets, and some endangered Piping Plovers.

(A juvenile Piping Plover, Plymouth Beach, MA)

I left my dad and sister after around 1.5-2 miles, when they turned back. I continued on to the tern colony. Least terns and shorebirds became more abundant, and then came the dunes. At the tip of the spit of land that the beach is on is a area of dunes, and that is where the terns nest. I scanned the flocks from a distance. There were many flying in every direction over the dunes, and a few hundred facing the same direction on the sand. I found a few individuals that could have maybe been arctic terns, but I am not good enough to know for sure. (Below- Arctic Tern? Who Knows?)

The birds on the beach were not near their nests, so I tried to get closer, but a handful of birds flew up and dive bombed me, screaming and flying at my head. Instead of trying to get any closer, I moved around the flock, trying to find unusual terns and marveling at the numbers and the noise. Tern are pretty loud birds. And 1,000 terns are really loud. They make a variety of calls, screeches, screams, and more.

Around this time I heard a different sound, and turned around to see a black skimmer flying up the beach behind me. It called a few more times, and then flew into a portion of the dunes close to and visable from the beach. I had seen them before in Florida and Cape May, but this bird was a huge surprise. I didn't even think that there range extended that far north. I study the skimmer for a few minutes, and then moved a little farther down the beach. When I returned, there were 2 skimmers sitting in the dunes.

When I got home, I did a little research on skimmers in MA, and found that they were unusual and erratic, and that nesting birds were very rare. I also learned that these particular skimmers had been seen before were known to be nesting, the only pair in MA and the northernmost nesting pair in the country. Over the next few weeks, I heard a couple of people talking about going to plymouth beach to see the skimmers.

I had gone to the beach for the terns, and stumbled upon the skimmers.

Eamon Corbett